gaelian

I have a side project where, for some years now, I've supported an app built using F# with Xamarin.Forms and the Fabulous MVU framework. Before .NET 6, things were generally pretty great, and I thought this was an impressive achievement considering how many moving parts the combination of .NET with F# + Xamarin + Fabulous entails.

As .NET 6 and MAUI started to come on the scene, stuff went haywire pretty badly, tooling issues like breakpoints in Visual Studio no longer working in my projects, obscure build errors, confusing build warnings, dependency hell particularly with Xamarin.Android NuGet packages and Xamarin.Essentials. I'm still not up to date with all NuGet packages because doing so breaks my app at runtime. I'm in this halfway point in regards to use of the PackageReference project type. Things haven't been smooth lately for F# and Fabulous projects.

Things are slowly getting better though, and I would say that my experience is probably not entirely typical due to the inclusion of Xamarin, which introduces a whole additional layer of crazy. I think if you were to use F# for backend web services for example, then your experience would probably be a great deal more palatable than mine. I don't think F# is stagnating or dying by any means, but I do feel that it is still a second class citizen to C#. I hope MS continues to work towards this not being the case, because with all the "batteries included" of .NET behind it, I think F# is a great functional-first language.

I've seen people report that they have reduced spam to near nothing already with just a honeypot, but of course I can't verify those claims.

Can verify from personal experience. I once implemented a simple honeypot approach on a small blog site. It immediately cut down automated "drive by" comment spam to almost nothing. I never tried to quantify it, but it was the difference between dozens of spam comments a day and maybe one or two a week (which I assumed were probably manual submissions).

Most spam bots are pretty unsophisticated it seems, and do not pay any attention to a honeypot field being hidden either by CSS or JS.

I remember watching that segment and thought it was a great illustration of the problem of people not truly caring about their privacy unless given a highly visceral and easy to understand explanation. The thing is though, even this kind of explanation doesn't seem to stick over time.

It's not the touchpad that annoys me, it's the fact that I generally seem to have to enter the address in the most non-intuitive order for it to find anything, e.g. first postcode, then street name, then street number.

First world problems, I guess.

Yeah true. Seems like the more feature complete assistance systems are making their way down to even some of the more low-end brands these days. Level 1 autonomy is getting pretty old hat now I guess.

My car absolutely uses the break when required to maintain the set cruise control speed, I've watched it happen. The car I owned before my current car didn't use the break to keep to the set cruise control speed though, so I get why you may think there is no break involved. It largely seems to depend on make and cost of the car you're driving.

turns out when you crush the competition with the world's best logistics technology you end up with a whole bunch of systems from the 70s/80s that are hard to update.

I hear Walmart makes much use of AS2. A means of transmission that I have had a lot of exposure to over the last few months (and absolutely no exposure to before this). While I think there were definitely some forward looking aspects to AS2, it's relative obscurity outside of very specific verticals and the fact that seemingly every COTS platform that implements it is overpriced and many years or even decades old (and feels like it) has not made my AS2 journey very pleasant to date.

So I just wanted to say: my condolences to you. :P

Any rough idea when you might have C# support?

Same. Massive reason why I watched the show.

I remember watching the first few episodes and Elliot is doing one of his monologues about the technology he uses and his hacking activities and I was like hold on! That all mostly made sense! What's going on here? :)

but then upload speeds slowly rip at your soul

I know the feeling. I'm relatively lucky in that I live somewhere that has had VDSL for some time and my download speed is adequate, if not ideal. But my upload speed is atrocious, in fact actually slower now than it was in past years (before my ISP got bought out by a bigger ISP) and my ISP will not guarantee any particular upload speed for my connection. I make use of a cloud-based backup service to mitigate the possibility of local disk failure and it's just painful.

You hardly hear anyone talking about upload speeds in Australia. It's as if cloud-based services aren't really a thing and we're back in the early 2000s.

That Australia didn't end up with a future proof fibre to the home system given the amount of money spent is an absolute disgrace. I get angry every time I have to discuss it.

I know this feeling as well. :) It is a massive lost opportunity that the country will be paying for in more ways than one for decades to come.

Windows 10 and so on. Yeah I know, I get it and it's not OK. They're obviously not alone in the exploitation of their user's data, however. I say that not as some kind of equivalence-based excuse but because it's a problem involving multiple organisations and industries. And while my main point is that Microsoft has - in some ways - changed for the better, in most cases, at the end of the day, the nature of a public company will always be to make profit measured in quarterly periods. And much like the proverbial scorpion (and frog), a public company will keep trying to make profit measured in quarterly periods to the potential detriment of its own long term viability and that of the greater societal context within which it exists. My point here being I don't think it's realistic to expect that anything other than external pressure will change the privacy situation you highlight.

And when the majority doesn't seem to care about loss of privacy unless maybe it's about their dick pics[1], I think you're right in that the privacy situation as it currently stands is not going anywhere.

Perhaps a little more on topic, the HR practices of Microsoft may have improved somewhat, but I have some acquaintances that work there and it's still not all roses in that area either from what I hear.

So I can commend Microsoft for what they're doing better while still recognising where they suck. It doesn't have to be a binary all or nothing situation. At least not for me. It ceased being a religious war for me a long time ago.

1. https://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dic...

It's not that cut and dry for me. I do see objective differences in the Microsoft of today.

* Visual Studio Community is now free.

* Visual Studio Code is free and surprisingly awesome, IMO. It's now my default text editor, having replaced Sublime Text.

* I think what they're doing with .NET Core, VS Code etc. is great, they've realised after completely missing the boat on mobile that they can't control all the platforms anymore, they've been forced to think cross-platform. They've been forced to think beyond Windows for the first time in their history really, and that's a good thing.

* Their traditional allergic reaction to anything open source seems to have been given a strong dose of antihistamines. They've open sourced a bunch of their own stuff and they're now #1 for open source contributions on GitHub.

* I like Azure, I like that they're making their own hardware - I used a Surface Pro 4 as my main machine for a while and it was pretty good, "devices and services" as Nadella has said.

Bear in mind that I hated Microsoft back in the day. I only ever begrudgingly used Windows, I stayed well away from any of their development tools, preferring open source languages and frameworks even when working on top of Windows. If I needed to run a server, it was Debian (this is still more or less the case for me today). I used to run Debian as my main desktop OS for a few years. Today a Mac is still my main machine. I say this because I want it to be clear that I'm coming at this topic from a place well outside the world of Microsoft. I am well acquainted with the alternatives.

Besides Ballmer, there has been a generational change at Microsoft. Is the publicity around this change somewhat marketing driven? is there still plenty of room for improvement? Sure, no doubt. But I think it's a bit disingenuous and overly cynical to 100% attribute it all to marketing/PR spin.

I have a new MacBook Pro, got two new LG 5K monitors with it and ran into this issue:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/271120/connect-2-lg...

I haven't had any issues so far with crashing/instability except it once didn't wake from sleep properly and restarted its self. Still trying to work out if it was anything I did.

Perhaps "resupply" would have been a better word.

"While these companies have said they would comply, when legally obliged to, with handing over information on their users, they say they believe that creating technological back doors to their digital systems can lead to potential abuse by governments worldwide."

This article is overlooking that it's not only governments that people would have to worry about if intentional backdoors are implemented.

Sounds like a commandeered/re-jigged version of a quote attributed to Râshid bin Sa`îd Âl Makṫûm[1]:

"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel."

So it would appear that amongst their other concerns, the Saudis also need to start producing their own fatalistic proverbs, rather than importing them from Dubai.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_bin_Saeed_Al_Maktoum

A bit of data feedback for you, getting to this page on your app:

https://askizzy.org.au/category/have-your-say/in/2601-Austra...

Suggests that the Commonwealth Ombudsman does not have an office in Canberra. They actually do though[1].

Cool project, good luck with it!

1. http://www.ombudsman.gov.au/pages/contact-us/our-offices/ind...

India is on the verge of finally becoming an internet-connected country. There’s already millions of Indians on the internet, obviously, but it’s still a tiny proportion of the population.

They have 950 million phones–almost a billion phone lines connected–of which only 5 percent are connected to the internet. So there’s a billion people ready to jump, as soon as you give them a smartphone, and a little bit of money to pay for the internet plan. They will be the next big cohort on the internet.

I didn’t have to worry about phishing, and I clicked on every email because I didn’t receive that much. There was very little spam, and certainly no phishing. I grew into the internet as the internet became more and more evil. As such, I can now behave in more or less secure ways.

Somebody entering the internet for the first time right now does not have that luxury, especially somebody who’s illiterate, or mostly illiterate, who can barely use a tablet computer.

This is a really good point he's making. I sometimes joke with my computer illiterate friends/family that I don't know how they survive in the world these days. But seriously, it's so easy to take for granted that many of us have had the experience of growing along side the Internet and having the time to adapt to it as it became more "evil". Being throw into the "evil" Internet today without that background would be pretty scary/risky. Having entire large chunks of developing countries doing it en masse is just scary/risky on an unprecedented scale.

It is however, quite hypocritical that Indonesia has lobbied for their own citizens to be taken off death row in other countries[1] yet they refuse the same for foreigners in Indonesia.

I don't disagree with you that the Australians must have known the risks and they chose to go ahead anyway, that was stupid. It is also Indonessia's perogative to enforce their chosen laws as they see fit. But there are political reasons why this whole situation has gone down the way it did, and those reasons are more to do with certain Indonesian politicians wanting to look like strong men in front of their electorates and the international community than it is about any specifics of this case with the Australians in particular.

1. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/indonesia-got-its-...

Earlier this month, FBI Director James Comey gave a speech arguing that the "post-Snowden pendulum has swung too far,"

There's a post-Snowden pendulum? And it's swung too far? In my country at least, the pendulum's swing appears to be unchanged from the way it was going pre-Snowden. If anything its swung further out - still in the same direction - post-Snowden.

Has there been some significant news in other countries that I've missed?

Maybe it's a generational or geographical thing within our country? Because I'm also Australian and I've never heard "lush" used in conversation around me, with this meaning.

Although this thread has just explained a line from a song by a US artist that I've heard where "lush" is used in this context and it now makes more sense to me.

LOAD * ,8,1

... The only C64 command I remember now. Which if I am remembering correctly, meant load the first program (usually a game in my case) off the terribly unreliable, usually at least partially corrupted 5 1/4" disk.

I remember reading a blog post[1] by a person whose tech/startup related business had them travelling in/out of the US on a semi-regular basis. They were stopped and questioned by immigration officials during one such trip. Here's a quote from the post:

I further explained that my current work visa application had been complicated due to a filing mistake and that I had been waiting on a decision. This fell on deaf ears. They searched my backpack, found my hackathon badge which drew incredible suspicion and asked, “What’s a hackathon? Are you a hacker?” I slowly explained that I’m a social entrepreneur promoting global change through the concept of ‘hackathons’ where attendees work together and find solutions to community issues within a tight time constraint. They were dismissive and didn’t seem to want to hear an explanation.

I don't disagree with you that the conversation relating to the dominant definition of the word "hacker" and related terms is over with the more narrow mainstream definition winning out. I do think however, that the disparate meanings of the word and related terms can lead to some surprisingly unfortunate misunderstandings. Maybe one solution is for people like us to start using a different word for what we typically mean when we use "hacker" in the more general sense. Though I guess if that hasn't happened by now, it's probably not going to.

1. https://medium.com/@aurora/are-we-welcome-entrepreneurs-or-u...

Another happy 1Password user here. I've been using it for probably about 18 months now and I can never go back to manual account management. It took a bit of upfront time investment to migrate all my existing accounts into the tool but once that was done, it's been a pretty seamless experience overall.

There's browser add-ons you can use to auto-populate your login details that work well for most login forms with mostly no or minimal configuration required. It can get a little annoying when the login form has a CAPTCHA or some other non-standard requirement, but generally all that means is a few extra clicks. When creating new account details, configurable (e.g. length, allowed characters, etc.) password generation is built in.

You can keep your encrypted data store file on a cloud service for syncing between devices, should you wish. Which brings me to the 1Password mobile apps, which allow you to take your details mobile.

Probably the greatest friction point I've encountered has been when I'm on a foreign computer that doesn't have any of my 1Password support tools installed on it. In this case I usually just pull out my phone, navigate to the login details I need and enter them manually. But I take this as a small price to pay for markedly greater peace of mind.

I really can't recommend using a password manager enough. If 1Password is not it for you, then use some other password manager. But just use one.

Certainly. But if we're viewing the scope of the spectrum under discussion as covering the skill levels of the people who play in the NBA - which was pretty clearly my intent in that instance - then they are the two extremes. I'm not sure how anyone could interpret my statement as meaning that the group of elite athletes playing pro Basketball in the US are not exceptional. But if that needed clarification, fair enough.

On the other hand, I think that we underestimate childrens ability to get up again after failure or isolated stray word of discouragement. Telling children they sux one too many times will lower their self-esteem, sure. However, most of them will recover from hearing something slightly discouraging once in a while just fine.

For sure, I would even go so far as to say discouragement is a normal part of life and if one was to shelter a child from all forms of discouragement - assuming that's even possible - then that child would probably not be very well equipped for life generally. This is an interesting issue as well, but I think it's orthogonal to the main point I was trying to make.

Potentially yes. But I would not agree in all cases. Does the teenager enjoy the activity? That could be reason enough for him to pursue it. And there's shades of grey here we're not addressing... OK so he doesn't have Jordan's innate talent, but does that necessarily mean he has no chance at all of pursuing a pro Basketball career? Of course not. There are many still valid and useful skill levels between the two extremes of "not fit for the NBA" and "Michael Jordan".

I guess I just don't see it as this binary situation where you either have to be the absolute best in the world at what you do, or you're not contributing at all to mankind. And that's the feeling I often get when people discuss these kinds of topics (not that I'm implying I get that feeling from your response specifically, or if I do I'm probably overlaying it with other discussions I've had on this topic).

I personally think one can excel from hard work alone. Maybe you can't excel to the degree of a Hawking or a Jordan in their relevant fields, but does that necessarily invalidate anything you have achieved? There's always going to be someone better at X than you are, for some value of X, at some particular time and place. I see an unfortunate possibility of unrealised potential if people - particularly young people - get it in their heads that if they can't be the absolute best at something then they may as well not even try.

Additionally, even Hawking or Jordan don't operate in a vacuum. What about all the people that have supported them over their lives, all the people they learned from, who - in isolation - the world might consider to be "lesser" people. Would Hawking/Jordan have been able to do what they've done without all that support?

I would have thought it pretty obvious that some people have in intrinsic "gift" in certain areas. This is completely obvious in physical sports and I don't see why - considering that our minds are underpinned by the physical structure of our brains - that this wouldn't also be the case when it comes to mental activites as well.

Just because I may not have the intrinsic gift that allows me to become the best physicist or investor in the world doesn't mean that I couldn't get pretty damn good at it if I put the time in, though. It doesn't necessarily mean that I would enjoy what I was doing any less.

I remember hearing about a study that I think was by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck[1] that basically found that praising kids for being smart (i.e. having an intrinsic gift) was far less effective than praising them for putting in a good effort (i.e. putting in the time and practice). While it is incontrovertable that some people do indeed have an intrinsic gift for certain activities, I think we should not lose sight of the apparent fact that just about anyone will do better when this view is at least not assigned greater importance than the need to put in a good effort. Lest we unintentionally start sending messages something like "Oh, well you're obviously not as gifted as Michael Jordan at Basketball, so you should probably not even bother learning the game at all." That's an intentionally exaggerated example to get my point across, but particularly when it comes to early childhood development I believe we should not underestimate the effect of even a stray word of encouragement/discouragement. I know that such words had a definite effect on me at an early age if they were from the right person - e.g. an authority figure - and often more of an effect than the authority figure assumed their words had at the time.

1. http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

If you work in an environment where you get to pick your own browser, yeah it is. Work in many an enterprise setting and IE9 could be more like the latest thing.