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myu701

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My wallet does not like you right now. Good quality hardback journals for 'cheap' (Office Depot prices), and made by a small US-Based company? Sign me up.

EDIT: Does anyone else know of any companies like this for office supplies? Notebooks, pens, inks etc.? I support Noodler's Ink since they are entirely US-based, but even they have some of their pens made in India etc.

2 things.

1) much better name for a matrix client than the others, Nova sounds cool.

2) $10/month is more than Disney+ per month. Could there be the option to accept a $5/month for desktop only and a separate $5/month for mobile? Then a combined $10/month for both?

Massive kudos on it looking good (even if electron) and doing Matrix stuff nicely.

I will be watching this closely, especially when Signal is ready to go.

major US tech company to outright crap on national sovereignity of an European country.

Isn't this just a modern version of merchants refusing to land at a given port of call because there is no navy defending from pirates, and the pirates know it?

I would argue that this is not anyone crapping on anyone's sovereignty.

Nobody would accuse the company of being pretentious for refusing to let their crews be preyed upon with impunity, it would fall to the local citizens to demand the pirates get gone, or they continue not to be able to get goods from that particular merchant?

US tech companies certainly do have bullying problems. I'm not sure this is one, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

It's on the way. Not done just yet. TL;DR: watch this page: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/wiki/Untrusted-device...

Short history:

There was 1 attempt to do it which ended with nothing

https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/109

https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/pull/4331

Then there was a follow-up PR (which I was downright giddy to discover): https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/pull/6214

That PR was just closed yesterday in favor of https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/pull/6727 which is where the current flame of hope burns.

Biohacking Lite 6 years ago

Anecdote:

We had Dollar G stores open near me. I do get groceries there as my most common item there, but it is in the form of 'grab some sour cream and a block of cheese' just before dinner is done. Dollar G is ~2 minutes down the road from my house, vs. Kroger or Wally World which are ~20 minute drives.

If I am going to go get groceries, I'm going to go to Kroger by default, Walmart if it's a particularly big run, Publix if I'm feeling like burning money, and Dollar G as a last resort, since the latter combines the expensive prices of Publix with the saddest store brand version of a product you can find, if they even have it in stock.

I looked at status.duck.com or status.ddg.com and both timed out so if they do, it's not there.

I saw this post, I'm not qualified to try to answer it, but I will say this.

If you learn how to wrap a web site/app in a docker container, and connect that site to an external database / fileshare, you have the core kernel needed to have easy access to the cloud services.

The cloud services offer various vendor-specific features. But unless you want to become an AWS engineer, etc., you will want to use each cloud platform's flavor of virtual machines.

Azure and AWS are fine to learn. I'm nervous that GCP will either be killed as a product, or your google account will be smoked by some AI, and either way, you won't be able to recover that investment in a google-controlled product.

I had someone who was an old Perl cowboy teach me Azure, but I'm certain that Udemy has a course that will work for teaching Azure or AWS.

Hope this helps.

In that case, think of a rapidly growing startup, which breaches that mark (50% or whatever the law says) - and now has to comply with the law.

But the startup is not capable of compliance, because the law was made for behemoths like google.

If I were 'king of the world' I would consider something like this, but would not have it be a binary 'must comply or exempt' but a spectrum of ranges from 'totally exempt' to 'totally regulated' depending on what percentage of 50% you had.

If you have 5% of user emails, you are responsible for the bottom 10% of regulations and/or you need to fully comply with the regulations for a sample size of 10% of your users.

IDK I need to give it more thought, but first, another zoom meeting awaits.

Your macro skills are amazing. Boy am I glad that wasp isn't live-sized because when my display showed it, I got the chills!

Phones currently cannot easily capture the details on the wasp, from the blood? vessels to the compound eye cells. Something somewhere would be blurred into oblivion.

Is it the macro lense that captures those details, or is it a wide f-stop / image size / ISO is low enough ?

I know the terms and that they matter, but not what combinations to use given what I want to capture. (this must be what it is like for a non-techie person to try to select video transcoding settings :) )

P2P Matrix 6 years ago

Original comment below but I decided instead to go for the following:

I am extremely proud of what work is being done online today to secure communications.

While we have companies telemetrying our native stacks[1], web browsers[2], and messaging platforms[3], we also have people working on software that doesn't do those things and still tries to empower the user to get what they need done without being a double agent for a 3rd party.

1 (windows 10, chrome OS, GMS android)

2 (cookies, pixels, fingerprinting, CDNs, chrome itself)

3 (whatsapp, FB messenger, telegram)

From OS[4] to browser[5] to messaging platform[6].

4 (debian, qubes)

5 (...maybe not? konqueror probably doesn't do telemetry?)

6 (irc probably, matrix, delta chat)

Matrix is IMHO in competition for mindshare not (directly) with WhatsApp, but with Signal.

Matrix | Signal

Increasingly decentralizable | Centralized

E2EE but not quite for metadata | E2EE and metadata-free mostly except recently requiring PINs and server-side storage

Federated with its costs (slower development etc) | Nonfederated with its costs (outages etc)

Temptingly close to P2P or CS | only CS

No voice comms | Voice and video comms

No built-in social graph | social graph via phone (being worked on?)

OSS in practice | OSS in law but hard to contribute to

I used to use writingstreak.io and it just drops you into a box and has you start writing.

I don't know what this one does yet in terms of screenshots or a quick tutorial on how to use it.

This could also be explained by user expectations for software rising but quality of Microsoft code remaining constant.

I disagree. Evidence that supports MS code quality dropping includes a significant amount of users hanging on to Windows 7 with their cold dead hands even post years of MS marketing, arm twisting, GWX updates, and EOLing Windows 7, with users paying for ESUs via Ask Woody vendors and/or that 0patch tool.

I myself moved to Windows 8.1 and from there am hem-hawing on whether to use KDE Neon or Linux mint XFCE and just leaving behind Windows except for the air-gapped Windows 7 VM I will no doubt need for things like Anime Studio. I will not allow Windows 10 (outside work devices) on my home network.

(Maybe for Centaurus aka Courier Jr...but I'll put it on the guest wifi and make a bunch of throwaway accounts for it. )

Welcome to C# 9.0 6 years ago

Well F# obviosly never gained enough momentum

As a member of the F# Evangelism Strike Force (to use an n-gate ism), I want to argue this point but there is not enough info to determine what 'enough momentum' means.

I can produce, without leaving F#: libraries, cli apps, windows services, windows desktop apps, websites (asp.net core + giraffe), web apps, SPAs (SAFE stack), and more. If I target .NET Core, I can run my F# in windows land, linux land, and anywhere else .net core has been ported. What features does C# offer that F# doesn't, aside from being more familiar to lots of MS devs? Even I started my dev journey with C# on Windows Mobile 5 via .Net Compact Framework.

Cons: The F# tooling is just worse than C# tooling. Compare the 20-year old language with support since Visual Studio 2003 .NET to the one that has for some reason focused on the VSCode + Ionide plugins rather than the tooling that VS users run into and even I can't really argue that C# has better tooling. Biggest weakness of F# is all the wonkiness when it comes to common tasks like making, running, building, publishing codebases. The use case of something common like 'make me a new blank app, I want it to use paket for dependencies and to spit out an alpine docker image with .net core sdk at the end' should be 1 command, then triggerable from the VS Debug/F5 button. It just isn't that yet.

C# has to grow somewhere why not this direction

I'd rather C# lean more FP than lean more OOP, sure, but _does_ C# have to grow somewhere? Can't a language spec be declared good enough / maintenance mode at some point so the programmers can focus their learnings on fuller understanding of the spec itself, as well as improving the implementations and tooling around a language?

Welcome to C# 9.0 6 years ago

Look - I don't have anything deep to say here. I can only say that between 'records' and 'with-expressions' now in C#, I as a hobbyist F# developer feel like I'm being shaken down by the mafia.

C# designers: "Hey, nice language features you have there. I'll just borrow them for a bit ok, it'll be fine..."

Later, C# programmers: "why would I learn F#, C# does all the same stuff!" (even though it doesn't)

Edit: I admit being both glad that C# is gradually migrating to the ML-style coding which will make F# more mainstream, and nervous that C# will get close enough to kill F# adoption yet too far away to actually get all the benefits of F#.

Some examples of this include the Hindley-Milner type system, partial application, discriminated unions, and all of the compile-time goodness the F# compiler gives and the C# compiler ignores.

I really like the idea of learning this. Using a unixy system, sqlite, and plain old CGI sounds like such a good idea to cut through the mountains on mountains of abstractions we've got today for React-based SPAs.

But C is insecure. For all intents and purposes for me, a hobbyist, it is impossibly so. Security experts and C professionals the world over work hard to make things secure, yet there are (virtually) always vulnerabilities discovered (or worse, not), and in the briny seas of the internet, I don't want any code I wrote to compromise my or anyone else's computer systems.

Can I write insecure code in other languages? Yes. Are other languages going to provide more guard rails against failure than C? Yes.

Bottom line: yes C is the one ring, I will probably end up using it plenty in other non-internet-facing capacities. But I don't want to use it for internet-facing things, too many ways for me to foot gun myself.

If this stack existed with a memory-managed language, even if it is otherwise unchanged, I would look into it seriously. As it stands, I don't feel qualified to try to write anything with the beaches stack since I can't reasonably determine with a hobbyist's skillset whether the application is 99.xx% secure from a vulnerability skillset for any non-trivial use.

Between this announcement, reading the deep dive, catching the "this Week in Matrix", and the work of the creator of Mistborn, my tech-support-coerced family Signal groups are soon going to have their days numbered.

Bravo Matrix contributors! This work in my mind is as close as we can get to the golden days of Pidgin being able to talk to everything and everyone, and having E2EE default is a must-have these days. So amazing to watch the progress of this from 'a few HN talking heads' to 'hundreds of contributors and dedicated staff'.

While Matrix will feel less secure than Signal since the feature just landed, having the E2EE data be self-hosted, federation-possible, and support multiple clients, removable-users-from-groups, and other features Signal is working on but tight-lipped about, means the trade off is increasingly trending towards worth the cost of migration to another client.

Matrix is just so much more collaborative and less authoritarian than Signal. Don't get me wrong, I currently use Signal above all others, DMs, groups, calls, the works. But the cloak and dagger radio silence, reticence to accept PRs, and lack of even basic documentation to self-host your own Signal server do eventually leave me with a sense that, while I'm glad for free access to this most-secure-for-my-use-case software, even free apps on phones and desktop could be improved.

Inkscape 1.0 6 years ago

so it would stop look and feel like it is still in 2005

Please don't do this, or if you do, leave an option for those of us long-term users who are used to the existing UI.

Between the Office Ribbon, Metro/Modern/WinRT/UWP/WinUI 3, Material design, I've up to my ears in flat, wasted space UIs designed to look as empty as possible in the name of 'cleanliness' and I'd hate to have my primary vector editor fall victim to the 2010s UI dark ages.

Bye, Amazon 6 years ago

This made a lot of people uncomfortable (software engineers didn't want to acknowledge the privilege they've been living with and non-software folks interpreted it as bragging). I think it must be pretty tough to understand the gap unless you've been in both.

I agree. Anecdote: The difference in treatment between a permatemp ('seasonal' worker at an entertainment facility working more than 9 months per year, later round-the-clock) and F.T.E. is massive.

In the former, you are guilty until proven, if not innocent, then merely suspicious.

In the latter, you are innocent until proven guilty or more commonly incompetent.

I'm glad I work at one of the latter places now.

I personally would only use the main one unless I had a specific reason to need the fork. I've never had any problems with Syncthing from F-Droid (and syncthing lite for the wimpy cheap android tablets)

Maybe it is because I always do 2-way sync folders, but I've used Syncthing for over 2 years now without ever having a hiccup.

I do take regular backups to Blu Ray optical disks 'just in case' but have yet to have need of them.