user_agent

I've put 15 minutes of my work into configuring the app. Even on that surface level I can conclude that the application is full of bugs that impact accounts and savings. It looks good, but it's unusable for any serius purpose. Have a nice day.

I've only used Fedora for the last 3 years as my main OS but some things you've mentioned (which I consider important examples) are far better than you might think. What I know of that has been solved well:

- "Multi-monitor usage sucked" - GNOME with Tactile extension gives you basically what PowerToys doeas for managing windows in Windows which is the top productivity experience of what you can gat on the desktop in general. Better than anything on MacOS for instance. And zero issues with multi-monitor.

- NVIDIA drivers failing on updates - I dind't have a chance to experience that during the last 3 years and I use one of the worst GPU setups that are known to have stabilibty issues on Linux - a gaming laptop with 2 GPUs, Intel + Nvidia. | Moreover, the overall OS stability is top notch. If it's not a clever GNOME extension called Another Window Session Manager saves my work and all opened windows every couple minutes or so (a GNOME session can be revoked after restart).

- "Music (half backed)" - a free Strawberry music suite is one of the best you can get and if that is not enough you can buy Jriver which is one of the top 3 best music platforms in the world. Or host a Logitech Media Server in a docker container locally. Plenty of very good options. (I'm a hardcore audiphile myself).

"full of bugs and incompatibilities" - I wouldn't say that at all. I consider myself a kind of person that doesn't like even minor unnecessary issues in my life and if Linux wasn't good enough for me I would not use it. (With a disclaimer that the fact that there's nothing like Linux from the privacy and freedom standpoint I'm willing rarely to swallow an issue with it here and there to remain free person in the lengterm).

Linux might not be OK for content creators, though. Or people depending on a lot of niche software, etc. In that case do what I did and find alternatives. Before you start thinking about switching an OS! Apps are more important than the OS. To be honest I'm pretty sure that with what the future might bring regarding how major operating systems work (as hostile entities) one might want to consider alternatives now regardless of how inconvenient it might feel... Linux is fine. You'll make it work if you want to.

A hint that might help at least partially: novadays for managing digital and handwritten notes I juse Joplin, but before that I was an avid Evernote user. Having a paid plan active gives you access to Evernote's OCR function on their backend. I had a lot of handwritten notes uploaded as attachments to Evernote, and I remember that despite my handwritnig being awful their softwre was able to parse it and allow me to, among others, perform quite advanced searches on my handwritten notes. I'm not sure if there's a way to make Evernote's OCR backend work for you in scenarios more elastic that what it's been built for, but I wanted to menion that there's this unique OCR tech that I think does far better job that any standalone OCR software I tried (for my handwriting style which I consider awful). It might be worth researching further for you.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang - "The Distraction Addiction"

I found it to be immensely helpful at a certain point in my life when I had to deal with huge workloads, and I was not ready for that (too young, lack of character back then, etc.).

Regarding the part about how to organize oneself: I found the GTD model of managing projects and tasks, and practicig it over the years to be the solution I could recommend to anyone.

Remember, those things take time. Invoking changes in oneself is a matter of years, not days. But it's certainly worth it! I can't imagine leading my life the way I was doing it 15 years ago. That would not work well... Today is a different story. Let's just say it's much, much better. Good luck!

I just wanted to say that you made my day, @retSava, with that /r/linkedinlunatics community :D I haven't been reading my LI feed for at least 6 years now. I had no idea how quirky things were there. Wow. Just wow.

Some less obvious ones for Chromium based browsers I use:

- Privacy Redirect [redirects you on the fly to custom frontedns for popular services like YT, Reddit, Wiki, etc.]

- Buster: Captcha Solver For Humans [solves captchas for me]

- WebRTC Control [I don't like an idea of leaking IP over WebRTC when I don't use it]

- Change Geolocation [forces a certain coordinates as a response to websites asking about your location]

- Disable HTML5 Autoplay [kind of obvious]

- PocketTube: Youtube Subscription Manager [I can't find anything on YT in the channels I subscribe to without it!]

I'm sure you're going to find you niche @rmoon.

I'm not in your target group, since in a case of being threatened I’d rather write a quick and dirty dead man’s switch myself, nevertheless people less technical than me could benefit from the service.

An idea for you to consider: at least in Europe, in the last couple of years on the enterprise software market Emergency Notification Systems (mass notification, incident management, etc.) are a big thing. A lot of governments in the EU either already deployed an ENS system, or consider doing so (it might be the case that they are obliged to do so, IDK). I can see how a service like yours could complete an ENS for a gov org for instance by supplying an emergency passwords / sensitive data sharing in the time of crisis. Usually ENS systems don’t offer that capability – they’re only about re-setting an org structure after a disaster, etc. IMO sensitive data redistribution could be an important factor in a crisis situation, and from what I’ve seen almost no one on the client’s side think about it beforehand… They solely rely on software vendors to deliver everything. Do your research. ENS are needed in many places: military, gov agencies, corporations, police, border services, fire deps. (also take a dive into mobile devices management suites [MDM], since they’re often a part of ENS deployments) Good luck!

@pramodbiligiri, would you be willing to share a little bit more about how the thext-to-speech is utlized in your project?

What provider do you use, the costs related to it, is it a real-time text processing, or maybe you have a bulk processing routine, opinions on different TTS providers? You know, things like that for everyone who'd like to try TTS in their projects.

(We're talking about >3000 abstracts TTS-ed on the author's page, and that's not a trivial amount if one is for instance using external providers for the job).

This is where I’m getting suspicious. 30M isn’t a trivial amount of money…

@Andrew_nenakhov’s comment is on point. Normal initiatives of this kind are organized differently. This doesn’t look good regarding the future stability of the initiative.

---

On top of that @sprash has mentioned some valid concerns about Matrix being a potential metadata sponge (below in the comments).

Let me add some food for thought for you. Maybe you’re going to get suspicious too.

a) On the Matrix website, the one with the news about getting the 30M, we’re being given only two kind of information: who’s behind the leading round regarding the investments made, and what features are going to be developed due to that donation. Now, we know nothing about who’s actually giving the money, because both Protocol Labs and Metaplanet serve as proxies here. On top of that pointing the reader to the new features part seems to me like a: „forget about the money part, take a look on what we’re going to do with that, take a look on all those shiny things!!!”.

b) Both Protocol Labs and Metaplanet are kind of famous companies (proxies). The second one invested in the Boring Company for instance. It just looks so good. It’s like a miracle. Matrix is getting attention it deserves… But why on earth that happened? (take a look on (c)).

c) Protocol Labs has strange ties to World Economic Forum [1][2]. They are interested in Protocol’s work in the internet space in general. I don’t like that at all. I fundamentally don’t trust WEF and I consider whatever they „touch” cancer.

---

I’m on the market for something that’s going to help me and my friends replace Signal. Matrix looks very promising, but after a careful consideration it also looks like it really might be a metadata sponge. Yeah, it’s all rumors, and establishing real information about the parties involved and their motivations isn’t possible. But a suspicion is enough. It looks almost too good...

This is how I decided to go with XMPP instead.

Good luck. Make your own informed decisions.

---

[1] https://www.weforum.org/organizations/protocol-labs

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/os8plh/the_world_econ...

I run a small website with 5000 unique users per month (.net core, server side rendered). It's hosted on an old Banana Pi with 1GB RAM, no ups, via my home internet connection (but with Cloudflare as a proxy).

The site doesn't go down very often TBO. - Power shortages: happens 3x per year for 20 minutes or so. The server boots up automatically after that. - DDOS: I have cloudflare. I have the server under monitoring. I have Mikrotik router. - Hijacking: I use a Mikrotik router on the edge which has a pretty solid firewall (+ Cloudflare). It's good to have something like that in your household regardless of your web hosting needs. It’s just a matter of paying some attention to your own internet security. - Active maintenance: I don't do that, lol.

It's so simple to setup all of that (server, linux, docker, cloudflare, firewall), that I think everyone should at least try. And it's fun, not an obligation.

I plan to increase the amount of services I'm going to host myself in the future. You can't go wrong choosing freedom.

Said that, I understant the hesitation someone might have when dealign with the problem for the first time. My point is that it’s worth to take that step.

PS: the overall availability of the service is good enough on my setup to not be penalized by Google's SEO platform (that's a thing if you have persistent hosting issues).

Regardless of the questions stated, thank you for mentioning Starlabs Systems, @mateuszf. I’ll be looking for an Intel-ME-free laptop during my next purchase and I had no idea about that particular project.

My mistake, I left the $ sign before the URL by accident. Yesterday was late when I was trying that and I made a noob mistake.

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. With the $ problem corrected, everything works perfect.

I'm trying to use curl the mentioned way via Windows' WSL. It only partially works - the summary is correct, but the compound values are all zeros. Ideas why?

     time_namelookup: 0.000000s
         time_connect: 0.000000s
     time_appconnect: 0.000000s
     time_pretransfer: 0.000000s
       time_redirect: 0.000000s
   time_starttransfer: 0.000000s
   ----------
   time_total: 0.001618s

'How do you unit test your code without mocks?'

I strongly recommend reading "Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns" by Vladimir Khorikov.

That's going to answer your question and will unveil a whole world of testing without mocking (not that it's better or worse than with mocks). It might be a single best book about unit testing in general.

I'm speechless, @OP. It ceases to amaze me that people who aren't in a position to generate value for others often generate more of thereof than a regular, healthy individual. I'd like this world to be inhabited with more people like you. I know myself how it's like to live with a deliberating illness, so let me just say that I'll be praying for your recovery (and if that's not possible at least less pain and a better "reinstatiation" prospects in the future if a reincarnation is a thing).

It seems that I'm going to make it regarding my health challenges, so I promise to make a good use of the Linux skills that your course is going to help me to systematize. Thank you. I'd not get into tech without what have happened to me. Being forced to be on a "lock-down" for 2,5 years I got myself step by step into an amazing world of technology which with my skills getting more polished made me feel I might be actually able to transcendent my body's limitation. I can only hope that something similar could still happen to you regardless of the discipline involved (I know that there's probably nothing worse than not being able fully commit to one's life).

Take care, buddy.

I've been working for a couple multinational corporations during last 10 years or so and I never had ANY issues with using Tor in the workplace.

What works for me: it's not a problem with tools, but with tactics of communication. Make one person from every company you work with responsible with keeping you in the loop (that doesn't mean to CC you on every mail) and answering your calls when you have doubts; only those two things - not asking for much, right? Make wrap-ups often. Don't read Slack BS, jizz. It's neither pleasant nor valuable. One can spend an entire life in an endless loop of "communication". Slack isn't communication. Real comms has to do with: agreements, negotiation, partnerships (even if temporary ones), taking responsibility. That last one might be the most important one.

And don't attend meetings that aren't absolutely mandatory for you.

Make someone else from the companies you work with to mark your progress on their internal systems however they like to use them, purely based on your to-the-point (calls, mails) communication.

With that approach you can take 5 more customers ;) All of the above sounds kinda crazy, but it's been tested in the battlefield for more than 10 years. Being as pissed as you are, @Op, is the best time to make those changes. Howk!

PS: If someone from you costomers' side isn't OK with that approach - fire the bullshitter. Take one that is going to comply. World is full of morons doing mostly virtue signaling, endless meetings, etc, instead of getting to the point.

Sometimes it's just harder to appreciate and enjoy freedom we've generated for ourselves than actually to make all that work leading to that freedom.

It's a self-resolving paradox though. Later in life we're wiser, and most of us can better understand our life thru complex layers of abstract models. Like how good are we with diminishing risks and what kind of and how many options we can generate for ourselves. Life is good after that. You trust yourself, you have control. For now just enjoy the ride!

This. Being prepared and thinking clearly is the cornerstone of being able to practice indifference to fate.

I'm also in a good shape thanks to that philosophy, and moreover - thanks to a life I've managed to generate for myself. One can't work without the other.

And I'm not a kind of lucky and happy-face hipster taking success in life for granted. Life has been throwing enormous problems at me. I have no idea what I would do without a proper philosophical backbone in order to deal with that.

The most basic definition of stoicism is "indifference to fate". In that scope Taleb definitely is a stoic. His approach toward stoicism, though, is less philosophy focused and more (that's kind of unique) targeted toward statistics. Ancient stoics don't write about their philosophy in such a way, but the logic remains similar. The whole concept of antifragility Taleb has promoted is pure "opportunistic" stoicism. Taleb is like a Seneca the Younger, minus some charm ;)

Regarding his online presence, anyone knowing his works also knows that he's using Twitter purely to mess with people. He stated that many times in his Incerto series.

Sometimes it's easy to forget what is the actual core of a given philosophy / enterprise / etc. Hence my whole comment. It's worthwhile to know, I think, that stoicism has a very important component comprised of pure logic, which Taleb seems to be hyped about (not without a reason).

I wouldn't call Taleb a member of the top-3 stoics though. He's balancing on the verge of being an outcast rather than hanging out with mainstream stoic crowds.

I feel you, man. Thanks for the info about the web version, BTW. For my taste even the mobile versions of OF aren't a real thing and are acceptable only on-the-go, even the iPad one isn't rich enough. But the desktop app for OSX... That's a beast (the one I can't have, since I don't use Macs anymore).

Plus I see that the web version has no persistent offline storage / mode. That isn't going to work for me. So, not only lack of features might be a problem.

That's true. OF is the king of all GTD task management systems and have been since always. It's the only thing I miss after abandoning Apple ecosystem years ago. People who don't do GTD religiously (and believe me - for them the GTD management system IS far more important than anything else in their toolbox) and other similar methodologies tend to have no idea what kind of difference a good system like OF makes. The guys behind the product nailed it and even now, as far as I know, no one was able to replicate their success.

I'd be in heaven if the company behind it - the OmniGroup - would be willing to: 1) Develop native or semi-native apps for multiple OSes + a web app; 2) Cut down their pricing a little bit. A similar strategy got Evernote a lot of users (although they still don't have a native Linux app) - I mean cross-platform and the fact that they offer reasonable discounts to their loyal customers.

It's also a fact that there's a lot people grounded in Apple's ecosystem purely because their dependence on OF (some even write about that here in this thread). I'm sorry for you guys. Really. Leaving OF was probably the hardest technological decision I've ever made, and even now - years later - I feel a thrilling fear remembering how I was struggling with myself about that, but I really can't afford being into a vendor lock-in with Apple or anyone else for that matter, whether it's in enterprise or my private life. That's dangerous and must have consequences in the future regardless of your current views regarding what Apple does (take a look on how many Fortune 500 companies went off that index during a typical lifespan - Apple isn't eternal too).

But somehow MacOS is a very important thing in OmniGroup. Their choice... But I miss you guys and I hope you'll mature to a similar decision I made - that Apple isn't "the one" and life has a lot more to offer ;) We could be friends again. I'm sure there are many others like me...

PS: People recommending some simple task management systems they use have no idea what they are talking about trying to compare it with something like OF... It's like comparing Windows' Notepad to Vim. Yes, they both are text editors, but the latter one is kind of "on-steroids" to the point where it makes no sense to even compare them.

Gotcha. I hope that you're going to find more reasonable options in your location. In Europe there's no problem with that and never has been. X1 is a rather expensive machine (and not that great to be honest - I have one provided by my employer), so maybe even a MBP with other OSes might be an option in your case. I know a couple of people who went that way (although it's kind of funny ;-).

Here we go again. It took less than 5 minutes for the above post to be down-voted by a progressive guerilla of HN. Some people simply can't stand facts...

This only confirms that offering anything of meaningful value to people here (with some exceptions) is exactly casting pearls before swine. Please, enjoy doing more of that and surely you're going to have high quality content.

This is not a problem with technology at all. It has to do with people's morality first and foremost. With Christianity dying in the western world we've found ourselves without a common ground on which we could build on. Values is what connects people fundamentally. If you have a situation in which - and this is the case right now - an average person thinks that his fellow human beings are just biological automatons, that there's no God, that one lives for the sake of satisfying oneself first and often only -- no wonder that this situation enables pathological turds to rise to the top of society. What they do to achieve that is not meritocracy, but exploitation of other people. Psychopaths are the new leadership. Hence the pathology like Surveillance Capitalism emerging on every corner.

Pardon me all that talking about God. Try to thing about it in purely logical terms. Values is something you need to make decisions (as qualifiers). Having none is far worst than deriving some from let's say Christianity. Or whatever source that has been proven to work for a prolonged amount of time in that area. Can be even Zoroastrianism, but it must be common and well respected.

The world looks like it is today not because people are stupid, or because like some say human nature is dark. That's not the case. It's been at least 50 years now when Cultural Marxism has started to seriously deploying their "march thru institutions". People in the US tend to know very little about it (there's not even one covers-it-all book on the topic in English), yet that one phenomena is almost solely responsible for the shape of our reality today. Not even the progress in science, nor politics, or the people wanting to live in a different, better way. All of that has been generated by a bunch of (I must say very intelligent) psychopaths who have found out how to level up psychological warfare with their methods coming down to (mostly) execution of the tactics of Critical Theory by Marcuse. They have found out how to modify human culture in a way that the society is going to start dividing itself into two tiers: commoners, and their masters. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, right? Unfortunately it isn't. That whole process is extremely well documented and everyone having enough motivation has a chance to achieve a proper level of understanding regarding what's been going on.

The cornerstone of Cultural Marxism as a model of managing societies is parasitism in every possible form. The masters feasting on the vital energy of commoners. Looking at the problem of Surveillance Capitalism thru that scope it becomes clear that its rise is the most natural thing in the world. It's going to be much worse than just selling data. Complete slavery for commoners is the end game and that is going to be achieved thru technology. Look at China and study outcomes of what's been going on there. They're just a test sandbox for what's planned for the rest of commoners.

Want to change / get rid of Surveillance Capitalism? Change back human culture in a way that people can either AGAIN care about the consequences of their actions or at least empower and trust their leaders who are going to do the only thing that can be done here to definitely solve the problem - kill the parasite. There's only one way for this civilization to win - it's thru a model in which everyone is going to take full responsibility for himself and his actions. How good are we with that you can easily answer yourself...

PS: I'm from Europe, so it's easier for us here to connect the dots thru reading sources in: German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian. Plus we can observe what the EU does on daily basis. Is it enough to mention that I've seen myself a portrait of Carl Marx on a corridor of the EU headquarters? It should be.

Whether you believe me or not is up to you. But one thing is sure even for a common Joe. There's something not OK with the world as it is today. I encourage you to find out for yourself.

Chyzwar sounds very familiar to me. It's one of the characters in a famous Dan Simmons' series Hyperion. Are you Polish by any chance?

If that's the case, would you be willing to drop an example of a banking company there that's doing node.js (that would be the first time for me hearing anything about a large scale deployments of that tech in banking)?

JavaScript -> Startups that hire young, "dynamic" people doing what usually no one cares about (most of them must bankrupt by definition).

Java / C# -> The whole enterprise sector. Which is much, much bigger and people tend to know very little about it.

A lot of devs are funny I think. I come entirely from the enterprise sector where I have been working my whole life. Looking at a "startup lifestyle" it's hard for me to think about it seriously. Yes, there's FANG, but who'd like to work there knowing that there are more healthy options. Oh, yes - the people who think that kind of work is a paramount of what's possible ;) I'd prefer to work with people who think clearly, know their options, can assess risks for instance related with an inherent exotic approach of the JavaScript world. There's no place in enterprise for unproven methods like that. Corporations are like military. They must rely on what they use to support themselves. Therefore, what you prefer to do also depends on which people you like better - yuppies or older engineers, thinking a little bit more seriously about themselves. I'm a junior dev, I'm 34 though, and from the very start I had a feeling that there's something very, very wrong with those JavaScript young crowds out there. I went to a couple of meetups in my city, and it occurs that majority of them are the JavaScript ones... There's one serious C# group (I'm into that stack) and probably 100 JavaScript-ish ones. The quality of the people in the first one, their maturity plus how they think about technology, I consider fairly more reasonable for my personal taste. Hence, I won't get into the JS camp until there's no other choice. Years passed since my first epiphany of "There's something wrong with those JS people" and the feeling is only getting stronger. I can't argue about it logically, so I'm not going to claim that kind of approach is universal in any way, bu I must also say that after countless hours of discussions with the C# (and Java too) people, a lot of them shares that feelings. It's about philosophy, about how one think things should be done on the most fundamental level. I've seen in my life maybe a handful of really reasonable JS devs, which isn't the case in the C# or Java world at all...

I didn't refer to most of your questions, @Op. I just want you to consider which kind of people are your people. I also wonder how do you deal in your workplace with your specific mindset, which honestly seems like the one often found among Java devs, not the JS ones.

Myself, I prefer to work on big scale, important, enterprise projects. Startups are just not for me. But I also like to do my own stuff after work, and both Java and C# are very comfortable for doing that too. I just feel very hesitant with using technologies that seem to be better suited for building let's say prototypes. I'd rather prefer to start with a real thing.

For the rest of the people reading this post - try not to hate me. I'm not claiming who's a better individual because which language is being used. I'm purely referring to my own experiences as someone who's having I think a rather different background than most people in web development. I'd really like to better understand why I'm having the impressions I've been writing about.

On the other hand there's a ton of people swearing that JS is the one for them. And they usually too can't help me understand why it's so obvious for them, like I don't know how to make them understand that the existence of JS in an abomination... And that I can't wait when WebAssembly is going to be a standard ;)

So, the question remains - are we really that different in how we understand what technology is and how it should be done, or maybe we all have a big lesson to learn here that's going to come later in our professional endeavors? Maybe someone with A LOT of real world experience could help with answering it.

Please, tell me that you're joking...

I went thru that like 8 years ago when after launching a great first unibody MBP, Apple stopped producing pro equipment altogether (a pro sticker doesn't means something is really pro). It took some courage to get back to using effectively other platforms, but it's been easier than I thought.

If I would be about to make that choice now, I can tell you that seeing what Apple does, I wouldn't be worried. I would be terrified.

There's a well known phenomena called "vendor lock-in". Consider a consequence of teaming up with someone you don't trust. Yeah, nothing good is going to happen because of that...

Linux is great this days. Even Windows is OK-ish. Apple was a big deal in the era of Windows XP. In those days it was a huge difference. Now they IMO have nothing to offer to a tech savvy customer. There's so many reasonable options out there that only a person enslaved by Apple ecosystem for years can think that there's going to be an issue with going with anything else than Apple. Yes, I was that person too. The truth is that Apple has nothing to offer except of shiny overpriced hardware and a fairy tale about user's superiority because of "think different". Nowadays I don't even care about what Apple does. The world is a huge place and too beautiful to look at it thru the lenses of Apple's gay-ish UI ;P Not that I have anything against gays, but how am I supposed to think seriously about a company that produces its widgets for the sake of making non-tech-savvy people satisfied? Go to an Apple store and for 1 hour observe who buys their products. That was an epiphany for me when I had doubts! Clearly not (usually) people who know what they are doing...

Writing this on a Lenovo Legion Y530, a great machine 50% of the price of a new MBP. Booting Linux and Windows. I have no artificial limits enforced on me by anyone. I'm happy.

Nothing of the above is going to work for an iOS developer, etc. Those people have no choice. Ups. Who the hell puts himself in an "I have no choice" situation willingly?

In short words: yes.

It's been fundamental to who I am today and considering where I come from, I'm very successful.

In your case - let me recommend you a book that's going to help you with three things: 1) To understand what a therapist can do for you and what he can't; 2) How to look for a good professional in that field; 3) What kind of problems psychotherapy deals with that are the most important ones (the book is written in a simple "cause -> consequences" way). I've recommended it to a lot of people, and in case of 70%+ of them it was helpful with making a breakthrough.

"Psychological Defenses in Everyday Life", Robert Firestone & Joyce Catlett

No doubt there's a lot of morons doing counseling out there. No wonder that there's also a lot of people not having progress. Nevertheless, psychotherapy DOES work and it can do wonders if applied properly.

Good luck!