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Mikina

@ Mikina @programming.dev

Posts
5
Comments
306
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Seeking to make a dynamic website right from the scratch. This is going to be my very first project. How to begin ?

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  • Please, whatever you eventually choose to do, make sure to continually reference this amazing website whenever you are implementing any interactable part.

    https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/

    It has cheat sheets for securely implementing everything from login forms, preventing common vulnerabilities (at least look at sheets for Top 10), forgoten password flows, storing passwprds and more.

    From the top of my head, If you are building it from a scratch without a framework, you will definitely want to at least look into cheat sheets about input validation, injection prevention, password storage, session management, file upload and authorization with authentication.

    They are not that long, and should prevent the most critical and common vulnerabilities you will probably have, where the prevention isn't too difficult, once you know about it.

  • Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code | Simon Willison

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  • The issue isn't whether you can get a good results or not. The issue is the skills you are outsourcing to a proprietary tool, skills that you will never learn or forget. Getting information out of documentation, designing an architecture, understanding and replicating an algorithm, etc.

    You will eventually start struggling with critical thinking, there are already studies about that.

    Of course, if you use it in moderation and don't rely on LLMs too much, you should be ok.

    But how did that work for everyone with short-form content and social networks in the last ten years? How is your attention span doing? Surely we all have managed to take short-form content in moderation, since we knew the risks to our attention span, right?

  • Linux distro Nobara 42 ships with Brave by default and shifts to rolling release model

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  • Linux distro Nobara 42 ships with Brave by default and shifts to rolling release model

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  • I really enjoyed my time with Nobara, and it was what made the switch to Linux stick for me, so I am grateful for the project.

    But, I don't get why would anyone consider Brave, with the many scandals they had, their failed attempts at extorting content creators for their own advertising crypto-scam and other advertising stuff? Plus, it's chromium when we need to push firefox more, either Mullvad or LibreWolf.

    Either it's a really negligient research, or they got paid. It's a shame. I already switched to Bazzite, so it doesn't really affect me, but it's sad to see decisions like this. I wonder what happened.

    EDIT: I should have clicked the link instead of wildly speculating :D

    Brave was not our first or immediate choice, however the decision to change to Brave comes after a long period of testing with various browsers failing in some way or another.

    Firefox and firefox based browsers (such as floorp and librewolf) would incur a GPU crash when scrolling live videos (things like youtube shorts, tiktok, etc) with VRR enabled: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/12528

    Chromium and Vivaldi both would break google meets with hardware acceleration enabled (however their flatpaks were fine)

  • Once you know Bootstrap's CSS you can't unsee it

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  • Agreed, the AI part is questionable, I linked it mpstly because it's mostly funny, plus I learned something new, tho I defo wouldn't take it too seriously.

    Also, no marquee :(

  • Once you know Bootstrap's CSS you can't unsee it

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  • AI will replace programmers

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  • I can share my experience with college, which it took me a while to appreciate but eventually I realized that while it wasn't apparent at the time, it did make a difference. But of course, your mileage may wary, it's just my personal experience.

    I felt like I'm forced to go through a lot of bloat I'll probably never need - why do I have to learn stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Smalltalk and other obscure languages that I'll realistically never need? Why force so much in-depth math, I'll probably never need to be able to formally prove the Big O of a Hashtable...

    After spending few years working after/during college in offensive cybersecurity, where most of my colleagues did not have a degree, I've eventually realized what was the point of all these classes. I noticed that people kept reffering to programming as in "I'm a python programmer", or "I'm a java programmer", but I never really felt like that - when someone asked me if I can write something in any language, it didn't matter what it is, I can just relatively quickly pick up the syntax and write anything I need in whatever you need, and I eventually realized that that's exactly thanks to the college - the point was not to make me a Smalltalk or Prolog programmer, but to give me a PTSD from every different style of languages, from OOP through functional to whatever Prolog is, and while I do not remember almost anything, I still have the basic understanding of how does that style works, and when I look up any new language I need to use for the job, I've already seen and was forced to once learn and understand (well enough to pass exams) something with similar concepts.

    And that's a really big advantage that people without degrees don't usually have (at least from my experience with my colleagues). It will teach you how to relatively quickly pick up different technologies and use new things, and that is a really valuable thing. And it's the same about data structures and other math - you will probably not remember it, but the feeling that "wait a minute, this problem sounds familiar, isn't there like a obscure tree-thing structure that solves exactly this efficiently?" or "wasn't there some magic with stacking trig coeficients for this?" will stay with you, and give you a headstart in looking up the concrete details that would be pretty hard to find otherwise.

    So I'm really glad I went to college. And in addition to that, it was amazing for networking - I had a masters in Gamedev and while that didn't teach me almost anything new, it gave me a lot of friends and an amazing community of passionate people that I keep on making games with.

  • There are Copilot ads in the dotnet docs

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  • There are Copilot ads in the dotnet docs

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  • I'd say a much better point is raised by this comment.

    Dotnet Foundation's whole point is to be independent from Microsoft. Why is it then pushing it's AI slop? Even if we take the point of "there are people using it", then why doesn't it talk about JetBrains and their AI, or Claude?

  • Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

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  • I don't think you need any active sabotaging in this regard. I'm not really worried about the future of LLMs, because we are already at a point of feedback cascade where thanks to LLMs, more and more of content they steal from the internet has been AI generated by them anyway, which will eventually cause the models to collapse or stagnate. And besides, you wouldn't be able to sabotage at a scale required for this. Thankfully, the spread of fake AI generated websites and content it has enabled is so massive, that it works as well.

    I'm looking forward to that.

  • Atomic Linux Distros: What Barriers Stand Between You and Making the Switch?

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  • This. The whole discussion about "tinkering with immutable distros" fells like it misses the point and literal meaning of atomic and immutable.

    Rebuilding the whole OS to layer another immutable read-only part into it isn't tinkering. Of changing one OS file has you rebooting, then that's not tinker-friendly.

    Atomic distributions are by definition something you don't tinker with, and it stays the way you need it.

    And no, having bundled distrobox or rollbacks doesn't make it tinker friendly, you can do both on normal distribution.

    But once you have done tinkering and want the system to stay the way it is - that's what atomic means and is for.

  • Atomic Linux Distros: What Barriers Stand Between You and Making the Switch?

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  • Snapshots and rollbacks already exist in other distros, so the (only?) advantage you are mentioning is kind of a weak point.

    Everything is a bother, since you can't just easily dnf install what you need, without actually rebooting or dealing with containers. I wasn't able to get a Win11 VM and work VPN properly working for long enough that rebooting to windows and just doing the RDP there was easier for me. (Because getting TPM to work simply wasn't feasible on atomic, and no - FOSS rdps didn't work)

    If an app doesn't have Snap or .App file, it will be a bother. Having to enter a container just so I can edit something in a properly set up nvim just sucks, adding bloat to something that could have been one easy command.

    There's a learning curve that gets in your way a lot, and since there are no actually payoffs for going through it, why bother?

    I currently have Bazzite on my desktop as a daily driver, and it has been way worse experience than I had with Nobara, debugging any issues with I.e audio or drivers is awfull because the resources about it are a lot sparser, and so far I simply don't see anything it does better. I did rollback my Nobara few times with brtfs and it never was an issue.

    One thing that may be worth it, if it's the case - can you actually export your layers into a VCS that you can then simply clone, just like you can with NixOS? Because if not, then following your logic, there's really no point in choosing atomic distro over NixOS. Sure, it has a slight learning curve, but you get a system you can not only rollback, but also easily clone anywhere you need it. What are your reasons for not using NixOS?

    That said - there is one use case where atomic distros are amazing - if you have a, well, atomic environment you don't need to change often. Bazzite on SteamDeck or LegionGo being the best example, I'm using it there and it's been amazing experience.

  • Teen coder shuts down open source Mac app Whisky, citing harm to paid apps

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  • He's 18, contributed to the Switch emulator Ryjunix, alongside some other projects while also doing school. His reasoning is that he along with Whisky doesn't have the capabilities, manpower and skill to properly contribute to the Wine on MacOS, just like Proton is doing for Linux, and that he's worried that if Whiskey would make CrossOver unsustainable (who do have the resources to do it better), that it could kill Wine on MacOS.

    I'd say that's fair, and anyone allegeding blackmail or buying off is insulting.

  • Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

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  • This... Is actually unironically the best argument I've heard in favor of AIs so far, that I haven't thought about.

    Still - the thing you'd be doing instead is feeding money and attentention to AI bros, and that's probably even worse than any job you could be micro sabotaging.

  • Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - 2025 Priorities: Reliability, Audio, Cameras and More (- You can Donate to support this work!)

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  • How's PostmarketOS doing recently, anyone using it as a daily driver? I have a PinePhone in a cupboard that I bought more than a year ago that lasted like a week as my daily before I quickly gave up on it (or rather, reinstalled it to Kali Nethunter and just have it in my pentesting bag. Not that I ever used it :D), since it had too many issues.

  • Explain how I got here? Not unless everyone gets really cool about a lot of stuff really quickly.

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  • I started as part time without any experience durring my college. I was studying gamedev software engineering, but we had one voluntary class about Ethical Hacking.

    I just asked my professor if he can reffer me to someone in the field, followed OWASP Web App Testing guide to the letter when testing the interview homework website, and landed the job without much prior experience (I did attend a few CTF competitions, though).

    Just following the checklist in OWASP testing guide made my results comparable to, or even better to some of my colleagues, and I've slowly learned the rest (especially internal domain pentesting) from our internal documentation or shadowing seniors during pentests, and simply being interrested in the field, having initiative and looking up new tools and exploits eventually got me to a Red Team Lead role (not a very good RT, though, but it did improve eventually).

    The pay was pretty good compared to what's usuall here in Czech, too. I could comfortably pay rent and get by even with part-time, during college.

  • FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

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  • My issue with canvas fingerprinting and, well, any other fingerprinting is that it makes the situation even worse. It plays right into the hands of data brokers, and is something I've been heavily fighting against, and simply don't visit any website that doesn't work in my browser that's trying hard not to be fingerprintable.

    Just now there is an article on the front page of programming.net about how are data brokers boasting to have extreme amounts of data on almost every user of the internet. If the defense against bot will be based on fingerprinting, it will heavily discourage use of anti-fingerprinting methods, which in turn makes them way less effective - if you're one of the few people who isn't fingerprintable, then it doesn't matter that you have no fingeprint, because it makes it a fingerprint in itself.

    So, please no. Eat away on my CPU however you want, but don't help the data brokers.

  • Graduating highschool and wanting to work as a programmer, advice?

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  • I did Software Engineering Bachelors and then gamedev masters, and while I didn't really appreciate it at the start, since it felt like I'm learning a lot of stuff I'd never need, I've eventually come to be really glad that I did it.

    Throughout the classes it felt pretty meh, I didn't understand why I have to do so much stuff that I'll never really use, and always felt like I'm just forgetting 90% of what I was taught the moment I was done with finals for that class. Why do I need to learn Smalltalk? Why Lisp? What even is Prolog? Does anyone even do UML anymore? I want to be a C# programmer, I don't need this.

    And it was true. From most of the languages I've had to go through, I don't remember almost anything. But that's not what it was about, and that's something I only came to appreciate with time - it was not about learning Pharo or Prolog, it was about overcoming the initial learning curve and getting somewhat familiar with OOP or formal-logic style of languages. And while you forget the details, the familiarity will stay with you. The goal is not to make you a Prolog programmer, but to make you a programmer.

    I've eventually realized that I can pick up any language pretty quickly, no matter what it is - because I've already seen and learned all of the different styles or types of languages there are, and no matter what it is, it's similar to something I vaguely remember seeing somewhere. And that's an immense help. I picked that up naturally, I've kept hearing the question "what programmer are you? What language you can program in?", and it felt weird - sure, I do know the most about C#, but I never had issues with picking up whatever was close at hand or needed, and writing anything I needed with a little bit of documentation and googling. And it was thanks to what I learned in school.

    And the same applies to the math and data structures that they hammer into you. Do I remember the difference between red and black tree, or a min-heap, and can I prove it? Not really, but I know they exist, and when I see a problem that sounds like it could use some obscure data-structure, it comes to my mind and I know what keywords to look up. And that's a skill that I've notice is missing from most of the people who didn't have formal CS background. Same goes for algorithms like FFT - you know it exists and what it's used for, and seeing a problem that could use it will trigger your PTSD.

    So, I highly recommend giving college a try. You will learn a lot of cool algorithm, and some of the classes were fascinating, and it will give you a vague overview that will stay with you throughout your carreer, feeding you with keywords about stuff that might be usefull for the problem at hand. It's the best thing I've done in regards to programming.

  • Asahi Lina: For personal reasons, I no longer feel safe working on Linux GPU drivers or the Linux graphics ecosystem. I've paused work on Apple GPU drivers indefinitely.

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  • This is the worst way how to announce something like this.

    I don't know the context, but if the goal was to not start a wave of speculations, it would be better to simply not hint at anything. I wonder what happened, and I respect if they don't want to deal with it, but this does feel weird.