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namingthingsiseasy

@ namingthingsiseasy @programming.dev

Posts
6
Comments
146
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • My understanding from what you're writing (and from this article) is that the phone number is really the account number. That's all well and fine, but then they force you to verify that the number is yours (or at the very least, one that you have access to because you need to receive a confirmation over SMS), so you can't use something more private. And sure, it makes it a little harder to find your new contact, but I don't think it's really that big of a deal - just exchange your other "account number" via some other channel.

    Besides, don't think for a second that when this identifying information inevitably falls into the wrong hands that it will benefit you in any way. "What are you hiding, citizen?" and all that bullshit.

    The part of it that bothers me is the sense of entitlement that these companies exhibit. The "Give us your phone number or fuck off" sentiment is something I just refuse to accept. If Google forces us to do the same and we refuse, what makes Signal think that we'll do it for them when they're so much smaller by comparison? Especially when you're trying to claim you're more secure and private to people that much more tech savvy than average, this just comes off as not understanding your audience very well. I'm sure I'm not the only one that is holding out against using Signal because of this.

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • I'm surprised this hasn't been said yet... but what I hate most about Signal is its requirement for a phone number. I don't want to be identified, and I want to be able to create multiple separate accounts with different identities if I want to.

    I also hate the fact that it's a mobile-first service. Yes, there is a desktop application (and just one really crappy one at that), but it's clearly designed to revolve first and foremost around your phone and be virtually impossible to use without one. As someone who hates writing on a 3-inch screen, this is a also non-starter for me.

    I understand the arguments about perfectionism, but this is too much. I'll stick with XMPP, Matrix and IRC, thanks.

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

    The fact that we have a telephone system that works with separate providers contradicts this sentiment. If I want to pick up the phone and talk to my cousin's puppy in New Zealand, I can do that without creating an account on his provider's service.

    I don't understand why we've forgotten this as a society. Yes, it was difficult to upgrade the phone systems over the past century, but it's worth it in my opinion. I really wish we'd start seeing government regulation that says "you should be able to talk to someone on a service without having to create an account on said service." I thought the DMA would do this, but sadly, Whatsapp still requires an account to talk to people using that service. Very disappointing.

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • The colors in the peertube logo are pretty hideous.

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • Are we claiming now that Activity Pub is the only protocol that we can use for the fediverse? I think XMPP is roughly 30 years old at this point, and I'm pretty sure Activity Pub is much younger than that. I could be wrong though.

    But regardless, I don't see why Activity Pub has to be the only protocol we accept to be considered a part of the fediverse. It's not even like different AP implementations talk to each other all that well. My understanding is that Mastodon doesn't federate that well with Lemmy, and I haven't seen Loops or Pixelfed on Lemmy yet either.

    I'd be happy to be corrected on any of this though, I haven't looked too closely into exactly how AP works or how it's supposed to interoperate with different applications.

  • Stop Treating Phone Numbers As A Digital ID

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  • No you don't! That's why we have key-signing parties!

  • Cory Doctorow proposes that Canada break ranks with international IP law enforcement

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  • While I think this is a good idea (because copyright is a stupid concept in the digital age), the problem with this proposal is that Europe is also very pro-copyright. Doing something like this would probably piss off Americans, but if it also pisses off your next best ally as well, it's probably not going to work out.

  • Linux Foundation endorses Chromium, SteamOS ISO is coming Linux & Open Source news

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  • Google pays the Linux Foundation a LOT of money.

  • Accurate programming movie

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  • Can we push back the deadline for the apocalypse? Have we talked to the customer to see if this is a possibility?

  • Physical Media Is Dead, Long Live Physical Media

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  • That's actually very easy to do and you don't need any special equipment. Simply use a male-male 3.5mm cable and connect one end from the stereo output of the cassette player and the other end into the microphone jack of any computer you own. Play the cassette - you can test the audio quality by running arecord -f cd - | aplay - - you will have to tune the volume output of the cassette player and the input sensitivity of the microphone.

    From there, if you're paranoid, you could use arecord to save the output to a .wav file and encode it once the recording is done, but I had no problem just using oggenc directly on the piped audio. The final command looked like this: arecord -f cd - | oggenc -q 5 -o file.ogg - (change to -q 10 if you want lossless encoding).

    I'm not sure if this is the best quality per se, but I would definitely recommend it over using specialized equipment like cassette-mp3 converters. The problem with those devices is that if they use underpowered hardware, you might experience buffering issues where the encoding hardware can't keep up with the audio stream or something like that. But doing it on a computer ensures that you will have all the processing power you need to make sure that this doesn't happen.

    Good luck! I found it very easy to do - it took 5-10 minutes of setup.

  • Ask HN: How to approach first days on a new job as a senior engineer?

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  • For me, the most important thing is always simply understanding who has what role in the company. When I have a question, knowing whether I ought to ask my direct manager, other colleagues on the team, a subject matter expert, other management teams, our sysadmins, etc. is the most difficult thing to figure out. It can take months sometimes.

  • Insiders say cutting-edge graphics are too costly for AAA games

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  • And innovative gameplay too. Large companies are too afraid to try new things, and all the games feel like the same rehashed mechanics with a fresh coat of paint... but indie developers are much more willing to try new, interesting concepts.

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  • Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they're being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

    The takeaway here is: don't focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you're on the side of the street with too many people, you don't have any personal leverage on your own. It's in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

  • Amazon is making its employees come back to the office five days a week

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  • In some countries, there are already.

    In others, it will be up to courts to decide whether this is illegally firing staff. That said, good luck getting equal legal representation to these trillion-dollar companies.

    So yes, basically, it's legal.

  • Android apps are blocking sideloading and forcing Google Play versions instead

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  • But part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you can repurpose existing computers running other OSes to run Linux instead. This is a great way to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, because it's easy to test it on a Live USB or a dual boot. It's much harder to do this on phones because they have locked bootloaders.

    Another problem is that phones are not productivity devices - they're consumption devices. Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don't think people will be as passionate about liberating their phones because they're inherently less useful than computers. Convenient, yes, but useful? Not as much.

    That said, I would love to be proven wrong. I would definitely consider a Linux phone if they become more popular/useful, but I can't really justify spending hundreds of euros/dollars on something for which I don't see any particular use.

  • Apple told to pay back €13bn in tax by EU

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  • Great to see, but are there punitive damages too, or even charges for interest? Because if not, then they'll just keep trying to pull stunts like this off again and again.

    (My guess is that there isn't because it involes a deal with Ireland, but I would love to be proven wrong.)

  • Apple told to pay back €13bn in tax by EU

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  • The biggest theft in history, even.

    Why is nobody talking about this?? Oh yeah, because it's okay when our planetary overlords do it. Let's imprison some more homeless people for stealing bread instead!

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  • That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?

    It's great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.

  • Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

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  • I agree, I don't think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they're still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don't care at all. They'll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there's no evidence to suggest that they'll ever stop.

    One of the biggest "mistakes" Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there's a good chance that it's not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.

    It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.

  • They're all vital

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  • Ctrl+H to open history then!