Postosuchus

vor 15 Tagendiscuss

KeepassXC comes with its own share of risks (supply-chain attacks, zero-day vulnerability detections etc). No matter, which 3p software you are using, you are effectively gambling on the chance that none of those risks materialize. The only alternative is to personally audit the code - library by library, script by script and build it yourself. But even that carries risks: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

Postosuchus

vor 24 Tagendiscuss

It used to be pretty popular for mathematical modeling in quantitative finance.

Postosuchus

vor 25 Tagendiscuss

You might have missed the memo, but Roku's main business has been advertising for quite a while. It is just shrouded in streaming and platforms. But it is advertising nevertheless.

Being a platform, Roku benefits from advertising 3 ways - by running its own ads in some apps and on home screen; by exercising carriage rights on 3p apps that show ads (getting a cut as a platform); and by building and selling audiences for targeting.

For all I know, Fox has zero interest in platforms or technology. But they are fairly sophisticated when it comes to adtech and this is purely an adtech play.

Postosuchus

letzten Monatdiscuss

That's precisely what is wrong with the state of the UI for Linux. Instead of boring, long research into user habits, finger memory, and productivity, resulting in boring standards like IBM CUA or Apple HIG, we got a bunch of opinionated engineers who think that people using computers fall into two categories: wizards, who are happy to spend their life tinkering with config files and making various pieces work together - and a bunch of losers not worth developing software for...

(Until Microsoft had actively started fracking it up, sometime around Windows Vista) just like a Roman citizen landing up in any town of the Empire, one would be able to effectively and consistently navigate around, using both keyboard and mouse across most Windows applications. Everything worked in a boring, predictable way. Everything used standard API that provided the whole spectrum of UI capabilities.

With Linux, unfortunately, this was never considered ideal and instead we have a zoo of different paradigms and technologies (plus intense politicking of UI development). Which means, when something happens to work as expected without excessive ServerFault/ChatGPT trawling and config/gconf/dbus wizardry, it feels like a sheer delight and an exception rather than a rule.

Postosuchus

letzten Monatdiscuss

I was not aware of that and literally read into this particular article. Thanks for clarifying!

Postosuchus

letzten Monatdiscuss

As someone who shipped my fair share of critical production features, I find this plan raising my eyebrows somewhat. Disabling a feature AND simultaneously removing the codebase for that feature almost never ends well. There will always be some use cases that people haven't thought of.

In serious projects (read, your career is at stake) a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means while still allowing a workaround (in this case, for example, PLM could remove X11 option from the menu but still allow X11 sessions when some magic environment variable is set.) That would give people an easy way to get the old functionality if something is critically impaired for them. And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed.

Postosuchus

letzten Monatdiscuss

Almost 40 years of software engineering experience - and I hate Gradle more than I would consider reasonable. In fact, I consider Gradle the absolute worst software system out there.

Absolute majority of people I witnessed using Gradle (myself including) approached it with almost religious terror. Making a change - any change - is akin to playing Russian Roulette, except all chambers but one are loaded. Change one directive - and your build breaks in most weird and incomprehensible ways.

And then there is the whole notion of stability (I mean "contract stability.") Almost every single release of Gradle breaks things in some subtle ways. I can take a project from the olden UNIX days with its Makefile and that Makefile will work in gmake in the freshest Linux distro, using gmake release that was produced multiple decades after Stu Feldman's make. It doesn't require a very specific version of libc or kernel. Because it is 1. Written portably and 2. It treats its behavior (jokes about using the Tab character aside) as a contract and it doesn't violate it just because some poorly educated software engineer decided that it would be a good idea to change the behavior in the upcoming release.

Postosuchus

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Amazing project - and you actually fulfill a dream of mine (to have a collection absolutely all historically interesting UNIX-like OSes in VMs available on demand).

I'll dig through my collection of "abandoned" OS distros to see if I have something that could make an addition to your museum.

Postosuchus

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I'm not gonna laugh but I can tell you quite authoritatively that Google will not abuse your passwords and passkeys. But more importantly (which is the main decision factor for me personally) - given the current state of software (in)security, I trust Google more than anyone else to build it right and to avoid attack vectors less sophisticated companies might expose.

(DISCLAIMER: I am on 1Password which I've been using for long long time - way before password management in Chrome became a real thing. But let's just say, GPM is becoming more and more compelling proposition).

Postosuchus

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Google's is even better, as it is cross-platform (although same caveat of having even more dependency on your account is still true). Plus (not sure about Apple) but Google also does (portable) passkeys and OTP.

Postosuchus

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

That's an excellent idea! It will work out absolutely great - much like Communism.

Meaning, when you forcefully standardize and regulate how phones are built, you might expect that companies will not compete on making better phones (since they are not very much differentiated) but on who produces the cheapest phone.

Postosuchus

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

This will not work for two reasons:

1. Thanks to the sanctions, it is virtually impossible for RF citizens to purchase anything abroad with Russian credit cards.

2. VPN was design not to obfuscate but to encrypt - that is, the protocol doesn't conceal the fact that VPN channel is being used, you just cannot peek into the content in this channel. Which means that more and more sophisticated tools are being used to block VPN communications.

Postosuchus

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Oh no! Yet another "difficult but right decision" (tm) to self-fund further investment in AI.

Postosuchus

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Funny, how we reliably keep finding the boogeyman - first in computer games, then in "right wing extremists online" then in LLMs, while carefully avoiding the correlation of dysphoria and mental disorders with gender change...

Postosuchus

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Indeed, they made Level Editor available. In fact, there was even a friggin' book on level design: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0782118690

Blast from the past indeed. Many many moons ago, I came up with a "bright" idea of designing a mod for Duke3D that modeled the office of my then-employer (large fintech company). At least I had enough sense not to boast about it - several months later a crazy guy brought a shotgun to HIS former employer and made national news, I don't think people would have taken my creation as lightly as I did back then. Still, working on it was fun.

Postosuchus

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

Snapdragon X Elite laptops have been out for the last two years, if not more. How much has Qualcomm did over this time to make Linux work on those devices - almost nothing. As of 2 months ago, the best you could do was a special cut of Ubuntu that kinda sorta booted on those machines and required Windows to be present in order to pull some drivers.

So how about you give me a fucking break, Qualcomm? Call back when Snapdragon has first class support in major distros and you are serious about Linux.

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