BaseballPhysics

Even if it was, that isn't a critique of the comment's argument.

Yes, it is.

The core of their comment is "oh noes western values will be lost!" (Or as they put it: "the global West has values worth preserving for the future").

My point is, no, they won't, because fertility is dropping everywhere. We're not that special. And that this purported fear is simply rooted in age-old racist tropes of a loss of cultural identity to scary foreigners, nothing more.

I believe thinking too much about kids is a trap. Basically you should have them if you can.

I cannot think of worse advice.

Congratulations to you that you found a life that works for you.

But the idea that people should just stop thinking and start procreating is absurd. Kids are a gigantic decision, the biggest one a person will ever make in their life. To not carefully consider that decision is utterly irresponsible, and to tell people to thoughtlessly have children without considering those consequences is equally so.

You realize China is having its own demographic crash, yeah? And India's birth rate is at or below replacement?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

Bluntly, whether you meant to or not, this comment is full of coded bigotry. It invokes images of a foreign hoard, bang at the walls of the west, threatening to dilute or destroy "our" way of life.

So, to be clear, I spent my time reverse engineering software rather than the hardware itself. That said, my observation is that a lot of hardware reverse engineering is software reverse engineering since the software helps you understand how the hardware works (the Asahi guys literally built a hypervisor so they could watch macOS interact with hardware).

And software reverse engineering is just grunt work. I'd start with a very well known existing hardware platform with a very simple CPU design--the GBA is actually a really nice platform as the ARM has a very sane ISA and it's all memory mapped I/O--and get a devkit and start experimenting by writing software to run in an emulator so you can get a feel for how the hardware works.

Absolutely.

And the other thing I love about it is the communities are typically super open and collaborative. I remember back when I first got into GBA development, there was a ton of docs, tools, libraries, and other things that folks had put together and then shared with one another. It's a lot of very passionate people sharing some very niche interests, which can be incredibly fun (of course it can also be a drama filled nightmare but such is life with passionate people).

Yes, just hacking nights and weekends. I've done my fair share of console reverse engineering, developing software for console devices (mostly GBA and NDS development, but a fair bit of SMS and Genesis reverse engineering), etc, and it's seriously some of the most fun I've had as a developer. But it takes an enormous amount of tenacity to push through the inevitable challenges.

Jit.si must not care about privacy or they'd have other OAuth options from the start.

Such as? What provider would you be comfortable with?

If they took away the code or relicensed it so you couldn't run it yourself I'd have a lot more sympathy.

Yup, very true.

Shame the dream of multicast died...

ffs, they're OAuth providers. It's not like they're passing the video streams over to Google and Facebook so they can mine them for PII. All they'll learn is that a user with an identity on their platform is using Jitsi. So what?

Meanwhile, the vast majority of users around here will have a GitHub or Google account, and probably Facebook as well. This is hardly much of an inconvenience.

And if the complaint is that now Jitsi can tie back activity to a durable identity: yeah, that's the entire point. They're fighting abuse. At some level, to prevent that abuse, they need some form of trustworthy authentication. That, by definition, means to some extent piercing the veil of anonymity.

It's also why running their own auth doesn't fundamentally solve the problem, as anonymous users creating their own accounts on their platform is a minor speed bump to folks who would use the service for nefarious activity. For that auth to be worth anything, they'd have to engage in their own forms of user verification, and that'd be no more privacy protective, and frankly probably less so since you'd have to trust their security posture.

The fact is they simply cannot run the service in a way that's both perfectly anonymous to Jitsi themselves and simultaneously resistant to abuse (thereby protecting them from potential liability).

Look, I get it, I'm not a fan of the big tech providers, either. But the claim that this somehow crosses the privacy rubicon is a massive overreaction. And the software itself remains as Free and Open Source as it ever was.

No, this is like a restaurant giving you free food, and then when they change the recipe, you saying "WTF, you changed the food and now it's too salty, I hate it. Yeah, I could cook my own meal, but screw that, I demand you fix it!"

but we badly need more options just as accessible- what other E2EE anonymous web-browser accessible tool is as available to the masses, that they can be convinced to use?

Just stand up your own instance and make it available to the anonymous public?

Jitsi itself isn't going away, just their anonymously-accessible instance.

By all accounts it's very easy to operate and requires very little in terms of resources. Hell, DO even has a droplet available.

So what's the problem?

I doubt this is due to illegal things. There's kind of a limit to how much you can do illegally on a video feed.

... are... are you joking?!

Fascinating reading the angry comments here.

Don't blame Jitsi. Blame the people abusing their previously wide open service. They're why we can't have nice things.

As for expecting them to run their own auth service instead of relying on a third party, that is a hell of a lot more complex than it looks. I can't blame them for not wanting to take that on.

If you really disagree that much, go ahead and fire up your own Jitsi service and open it up for anonymous use by the public. Let's see how long you can run it before you encounter the exact same problems.

Just because you define "decentralized" as strictly "peer-to-peer" doesn't mean everyone does.

Wikipedia literally uses the word "decentralized" to describe the Fediverse, which would seem to violate your personal definition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

While a traditional social networking site will host all its content on servers owned by the parent company, the decentralized social media sites that make up the fediverse allow any individual or organization to host their own servers (referred to as an "instance").

It goes to show how your upbringing affects these things. Before Ruby I spent a lot of time in Smalltalk which really shaped the way I thought about language and program structure, APIs, etc. I'd also spent a metric ton of time writing Perl. Jumping into Ruby was like putting on a comfortable pair of shoes.

Meanwhile Python always felt like an ill-fitting suit to me. I just personally didn't connect with the language design.

But, to each their own!

Just popping in to say: me too! I feel like there needs to be a community or forum for people like us. I know at least one other person in my circle doing the same. Seems to be rare but more common than I realized...

So I just need to upgrade my current induction stove to a newer model? That seems reasonable... ;)

Not worth it. A temperature controllable kettle that shuts itself off and can keep water warm is both incredibly convenient and far more safe.

It's Electron-based, yes. Anyone using it on Wayland with fractional scaling will know that...

No you don't. A ban forces industries to create alternatives. Otherwise they won't bother. You just schedule a phased elimination over time so those alternatives can get developed. That's precisely how the Montreal Protocol banned CFCs and protected the ozone layer:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

What?

The things I may want to learn or do in service of a hobby or personal interest are very different from those topics relevant to my professional life, and the motivations and the value I get from it are entirely different as well.

And this article is clearly written with a professional context in mind.

Unless you think that when he mentioned how his "software developer colleagues often ask me where I do get all the time for reading all the tech books or articles, watching conference talks and listening to podcasts," they were marveling at his woodworking hobby?

Except ironically there's a theory that a lack of parasitic infections may contribute to autoimmune diseases:

https://focus.science.ubc.ca/worms-ae3a1579c58c

Humanity evolved with parasites. Like gut bacteria, excessive focus on hygeine may be more harmful than helpful.

Ah but that's a very different thing.

You're treating tech as a hobby and engaging with it accordingly.

This piece literally started with:

My software developer colleagues often ask me where I do get all the time for reading all the tech books or articles, watching conference talks and listening to podcasts.

Immediately we, the reader, know this isn't about having fun in your spare time or learning and building purely for pleasure.

It's all about achieving, about being that person that other people look to and think "wow, where do they find the time to be so productive??"

If it were as you say, I'd have no issues with the piece at all.

Guess again. I'm old enough to realize that tying your self-worth to objectified life goals and measurable achievements is a fool's errand sold to us by a self-help industrial complex designed to make us feel as bad as possible all the time so we'll constantly strive for the next cure for the sense of emptiness they create and then purport to fix; a feeling only exacerbated by social media, which constantly presents us with people who seem to be smarter, more driven, more successful, more wealthy, so that we're constantly asking ourselves "shit, what have I done with my life?"

Hmm, you're gonna need to explain that again. How will this help me increase my LTV and ensure I'm optimizing every minute of the day for maximal productivity?

goal-setting, time management, and motivation.

Oh good.

More productivity hacking.

Maybe I should come up with some KPIs? Put together quarterly reports? Find more ways to quantify my self-worth so I can maximize it?

Yeah except the piece started with:

My software developer colleagues often ask me where I do get all the time for reading all the tech books or articles, watching conference talks and listening to podcasts.

They're not talking about learning about woodworking on the side, or learning about tech for fun. They specifically situated the piece in the world of work right at the start, going so far as to present themselves as some kind of mysterious marvel that their co-workers have tried to unravel.

This is just another tech productivity hacking piece. Good ol' workaholic porn, in the same vein as "Wanna get hired? Start a dozen side projects!" or "Hack leetcode in your remaining waking hours for fun and profit, except without the fun!"

It's a trope at this point, and an unhealthy one.

Another commenter also made a very good point: you've gotta let off the gas a bit. If everyone is going flat out, the surrounding pressures will cause people to prioritize being responsive to those pressures.

But that requires a fundamental change in organizational productivity culture and means this kind of policy probably needs to be implemented -- and critically, measured -- at the corporate level so people collectively recognize that learning time is sacrosanct.

No big deal!