Or at least, if you rage quit doesn’t there have to be some rage?

Oh, there is. You feel the rage internally, but you would never give anyone else the satisfaction of seeing you rage. You save the rage until after the quit and then you rage in privacy. I’ve ragequit many a thing. I am very experienced at this.

No he’s admitted it, although he claims he has a prescription and it’s for depression.

I want to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride

At least 1% of the money being poured into “AI research” nowadays seems to be spent on spewing these breathless puff pieces everywhere. The other 99% is spent on datacenter costs, probably. I am so excited for the day this bubble will finally pop. Just imagine the firesales on GPUs and rack space. It’ll be glorious.

If we’re actually trying to achieve sustainability, we have to stop being consumers. “consume” means to use up and destroy leaving nothing useful behind. This is what consumers do. Think about this the next time someone says the “additional price is passed on to the consumer” and phrases like that. Want to stop paying those prices? Stop consuming!

Instead of sending your money to some evil dictatorship on the other side of the world to “consume” something else, we should be building a system and a society where we can give that money, probably a little more more money even, to somebody in your local community to do actual productive work that doesn’t destroy the environment.

Right to repair is a huge project that we need to force down the throats of the large corporations who want to keep us being consumers forever no matter how much it destroys the planet. But India can still do things like this even without having the “right” to repair, they just figure out a solution and do it anyway, and we can too if we learn from them. We throw away so much perfectly useful stuff. Not just electronics but everything in our modern world from clothes to cars, because economics has told us that it’s expensive to repair or repurpose or salvage, and cheaper to buy a new one, buy more, buy in bulk, buy and dispose. And it often is, but that’s false economics. It’s the economics of throwing more shit in landfill and digging up more tons of rock and burning coal to turn it into something new. It’s the economics with all the costs externalized onto the environment and onto the future. It’s the economics of us destroying ourselves.

In my experience, Ukrainians don’t really mind how non-native speakers pronounce it, they understand the intention and appreciate the feeling behind it.

Ugh, don’t give him any more reasons to attack Canada please.

Nextcloud Notes or Joplin (nevermind all the other features Nextcloud provides) tick most of your boxes. They’re more productivity focused than privacy focused, it doesn’t do “zero knowledge” encryption the way you’re describing, but I don’t really understand the point of that when you’re self-hosting and the server host belongs to you anyway. The federation may leave you wanting more and the collaboration might not be “real time” enough for you either, though. If you can build something better by all means go for it.

When it comes to TikTok it is less clear to me what a good decision would be

the fact a foreign and potentially hostile state can influence the people is a serious threat.

That seems pretty clear to me.

fail2ban is mandatory equipment for any ssh server accessible to the public especially on its default port. It’s highly configurable, but the default settings will do fine at making it statistically impossible for any user or password to be brute forced.

China. The people are super nice, sweet, helpful, lovely people. It’s just their government I hate. I don’t know if they hate it too or not since they’re not free to say but I think they’re nice people and they deserve better.

Yeah he’s got some serious abusive spouse energy going on at times with all the emotional whiplash. Beats the shit out of you and then “aww baby, come on, you know I love you” then beats you some more.

I guess they ran out of Public Integrity to report on, there’s none left.

Who would’ve ever thought we would’ve ever needed something like this. I am glad my veteran father never lived to see this happen, it would’ve broken him. This is what he fought against.

Yeah when I first started there was one guy whose code reviews I dreaded, he would nitpick every detail and he would stand by it, he would tell me to do it a completely different way that was 10x more work. It felt like I would never get my stories done because I had drawn “that asshole” in the code review lottery.

Years later, I came to realize that he was actually the best, he taught me so much about the way I should be thinking of things and structuring things, that have saved so much time and trouble later on, I now specifically reach out to him for a review when I am trying to do something complex because I know he’s going to give me an honest, thorough and useful review. Nobody’s doing anyone any favours in the long run by rubber stamping things, it may help you keep your sprint velocity up, but it’s not going to result in high quality code, and the bad quality code will inevitably bite you.

I actually dare them to try. I’m really looking forward to the massive paychecks I’m going to get when companies are panicking to try to untangle all the absolute nonsense bullshit these AI companies are about to unleash into corporate codebases. The AI-slop bugfest will make the Y2K issue seem trivial. I’m so excited, the future looks very bright for human software developers.

My advice: Practice going over other people’s code with a fine-tooth comb looking for bad architecture, flaws and inefficiencies. You won’t always be right, you won’t find them all, but you’ll learn lots of skills you’ll need in the future. Whatever you do, don’t undersell yourselves, remember that your experience is valuable, and AI has no experience, it just has a huge library it can shotgun “solutions” out of. Half the time they don’t even compile, nevermind work properly, or efficiently.

I feel like 99% of the time that’s just a lazy or misleading excuse. I’ve worked in proprietary software development for 25 years and I’ve never worked for a company that didn’t avoid restricted third-party code like the plague at all times. In the few, rare cases when we did have to use some proprietary third-party licensed library, it was usually kept very compartmentalized and easy to drop out of the code specifically because we were always afraid the other proprietary code vendor could fuck us and jack up their prices or find some nasty way to make our lives difficult.

The excuse that there is some secret but legitimate third-party code they’re not allowed to share simply doesn’t hold water in the vast majority of cases.

More likely answers are that some beancounter somewhere still imagines that the proprietary source code could possibly be valuable in some hypothetical future acquisition (nonsense of course) even though it has no real commercial value, or fears that it could expose the company to liability if some security flaw or licensing violation is found (more plausible).

Ironically, perhaps the most likely reality for this resistance is that the software actually includes code that dictates they were actually always obligated to publish the source but never did. ie, GPL-based code. GPL violations are all too common in proprietary software and very few organizations have codebase governance effective enough to keep the situation under control with developers copy-pasting from anything they can find on Google. Releasing their plagiarized GPL source code would reveal to the world that they were not in compliance all along. Let it quietly die, and nobody ever finds out and they get away with it. It’s not simply that they’re embarrassed by bad code, it’s that their bad code will potentially incriminate them. Not worth the risk, and sometimes it’s not just a risk it’s a certainty.

The proprietary software industry relies on open source so much and rarely gives much of anything back. I’m fortunate that the company I’m working for now actually takes licensing seriously and does contribute to open source projects to some degree, although I keep insisting they need to do better.

There is always going to be some level of interpretation. You are looking for an absolute truth that, while it may theoretically exist, cannot be reliably perceived through a human lens, which you are guaranteed to have at least 1 of (yourself), and almost certainly 2 (the source), and maybe many, many, many more in between.

Imagine you had a time machine that could bring you back into whatever time you’re interested so you can watch it unfold first-hand. Ok, great. But do you trust your eyes? Did you see everything that happened? Even if you can invisibly go and explore the aftermath. Even if you can go back to the same point 100 times, 1000 times, and meticulously detail everything you find. Do you now have the perfect and unambiguous truth? Of course not. You can make mistakes, you can misunderstand. Even our eyes lie to us. Even our brain misremembers things. Different people using the same time machine to travel to the exact same point in time may see what happens in an entirely different way, may see things that you did not see. Who’s right?

I know you think you’re looking for the absolute unvarnished truth, but you are chasing a phantom. Your goal is not realistic. At some point you have to arbitrarily accept and define what errors and limitations the sources you’re drawing your understanding from might have, and attempt to make your own interpretation of what the facts actually are. You will never know what really happened with absolute certainty. Absolute certainty is its own kind of myth and there’s some very fundamental metaphysical reasons for that. You’re not going to find a magic textbook of trustworthy history that solves that problem.

Understanding history is a process that requires connecting many different pieces of variously flawed contexts and information to paint your own, interpreted but hopefully relatively accurate picture. No matter what book you read, you cannot guarantee its accuracy and it is a fool’s errand to try, but you can continue to try to collect more evidence, more pieces of context, more clues to add more details to your picture. Perhaps you will never be satisfied with the detail of the picture you’ve created, sometimes you will have to throw your whole picture away and start to create a new and different picture on the basis of some details you find that don’t fit. You’re never going to have a perfect picture, but I think a lot of people have managed to create really pretty good ones based on a whole lot of research of many different sources and pieces of detail, not just written records alone but cultural references, archaeological artifacts, scientific analysis, and sometimes just assumptions about basic human behavior. You just have to learn who and what you can trust and how far you can trust them. Both as sources, and as interpreters. And you are always welcome to argue you own interpretation.

Basic rules: Have a strong password. Don’t reuse that password on other sites because it’s more likely one of those sites will get hacked then all your accounts with the same password will get hacked. For sites that support it, enable 2FA/MFA codes or email verification. Keep your email accounts and cell phone number/identity locked down like Fort Knox, since email and phones can be used to password reset just about anything you have, usually with little difficulty.

That said, if the accounts had no activity for 2 years, they were probably created intentionally for the purpose of spamming/selling. They may have been saving them to see if the value goes up. They might have just recently been sold to a spammer and activated in their spambots.

OpenXcom is a fantastic reimplementation of the original, and has some even more fantastic mods. I agree if you’ve never played it before and aren’t too familiar with old school “Nintendo-hard” games, it can be extremely challenging even on the lowest difficulty. Fun fact, the original had a broken difficulty selection and reset to the “easiest” difficulty after reloading any save game, so most people never truly experienced a full run at any difficulty above “easiest”, so that’s just naturally perceived as the way the game was meant to be balanced. Don’t be ashamed of playing on the easiest difficulty or using “cheat” mods if that’s what makes it playable for you. There’s nobody to judge you but yourself and what matters is that you’re having fun. And it is a ridiculously fun and replayable game, to me at least.