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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TS
thanks_shakey_snake @ thanks_shakey_snake @lemmy.ca
Posts
4
Comments
687
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • FWIW, WeChat and 微信 are different apps. With a non-Chinese phone number and Google Play Store download, you'll be using the international one (WeChat) instead of the Chinese one (微信). There are still privacy concerns, but it'll be less invasive than what you'd have with the version that people in China are buying their groceries with and stuff.

    I'm sorry I don't have advice for how to actually protect yourself, though... I'll be keeping an eye on this thread to see what I can learn.

  • Yeah, I'm wondering about how they characterize "bot activity." It seems like "any traffic not proximally related to a user's synchronous activity" is a little too broad.

    I'm not sure if fediverse syncing is bot activity. Or my laptop checking for software updates while I'm sleeping. Or my autopay transactions for utility bills.

  • Ah, you've never worked somewhere where people regularly rebase and force-push to master. Lucky :)

    I have no issue with rebasing on a local branch that no other repository knows about yet. I think that's great. As soon as the code leaves local though, things proceed at least to "exercise caution." If the branch is actively shared (like master, or a release branch if that's a thing, or a branch where people are collaborating), IMO rebasing is more of a footgun than it's worth.

    You can mitigate that with good processes and well-informed engineers, but that's kinda true of all sorts of dubious ideas.

  • You can get in some pretty serious messes, though. Any workflow that involves force-pushing or rebasing has the potential for data loss... Either in a literally destructive way, or in a "Seriously my keys must be somewhere but I have no idea where" kind of way.

    When most people talk about rebase (for example) being reversible, what they're usually saying is "you can always reverse the operation in the reflog." Well yes, but the reflog is local, so if Alice messes something up with her rebase-force-push and realizes she destroyed some of Bob's changes, Alice can't recover Bob's changes from her machine-- She needs to collaborate with Bob to recover them.

  • I gotta say, I was with you for most of this thread, but looking through old commits is definitely something that I do on a regular basis... Like not even just because of problems, but because that's part of how I figure out what's going on.

    The whole reason I keep my git history clean and my commit messages thoughtful is so that future-me (or future-someone-else) will have an easier time walking through it later, because that happens all the time.

    I'll still almost always choose merge instead of rebase, but not because I don't care about the git history-- quite the opposite, it's really important to me in a very practical way.

  • Yeah, tbh the "no timezones" approach comes with its own basket of problems that isn't necessarily better than the "with timezones" basket. The system needed to find a balance between being useful locally, but intelligible across regions. Especially challenging before ubiquitous telecommunications

    Imagine having to rethink the social norms around time every time you travel or meet someone from far away. They say "Oh I work a 9-to-5 office job" and then you need to figure out where they live to understand what that means. Or a doctor writes a book where they recommend that you get to bed by 2:00PM every night, and then you need to figure out how to translate that to a time that makes sense for you.

    We'd invent and use informal timezones anyway, and then we'd be writing Javascript functions to translate "real" times to "colloquial" times, and that's pretty close to just storing datetimes in UTC then translating them to a relevant timezone ad hoc, which is what we're already doing.

    That's what my rational programmer brain says. My emotional programmer brain is exactly this meme.

  • My favorite was when my new Windows 11 laptop started automatically backing up my files to OneDrive without telling me, then STOPPED LETTING ME SEND AND RECEIVE EMAILS because my OneDrive was full. Full of stuff that I never wanted to back up.

    So one of my main email accounts, which I've used within the free tier limits for 20ish years, suddenly went dark because I signed into Windows.

    Of course while investigating, the UI offered helpful options like:

    • Pay for more cloud storage

    (Not depicted: "Free up some space," "Disable backups")

    Epilogue: After several rounds of disabling backups, then deleting the stuff in OneDrive, then Windows deciding that I couldn't have wanted that and backing all my stuff up again anyway, I finally fixed it by deleting some key directories so the backup would just fail.