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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Backwards compatibility - yes I agree, it’s quite good at it.

    Hardware specific issues for any OSes - disagree. For windows that’s 80-90% done by the hardware manufacturer’s drivers. It’s not through an effort from Microsoft whether issues are fixed or not. For Linux it’s usually an effort of maintainers and if anything, Linux is famous for supporting old hardware that windows no longer works with.

    But the point I was making is not to say Linux or osx is better than windows or vice versa, it’s that windows holds by far the largest market share in desktops and neither of the alternatives are really drop-in replacements. So in the end they have no pressure on them to improve UX since it’s infeasible to change OS for the majority of their users at the moment.


  • Aside from the effort required others have mentioned, there’s also an effect of capitalism.

    For a lot of their tech, they have a near-monopoly or at least a very large market share. Take windows from Microsoft. What motivation would they have to fix bugs which impact even 5-10% of their userbase? Their only competition is linux with its’ around 4(?)% market share and osx which requires expensive hardware. Not fixing the bug just makes people annoyed, but 90% won’t leave because they can’t. As long as it doesn’t impact enterprise contracts it’s not worth it to fix it because the time spent doing that is a loss for shareholders, meanwhile new features which can collect data (like copilot for example) that can be sold generate money.

    I’m sure even the devs in most places want to make better products and fight management to give them more time to deliver features so they can be better quality - but it’s an exhausting sharp uphill battle which never ends, and at the end of the day the person who made broken feature with data collector 9000 built in will probably get the promotion while the person who fixed 800 5+ year old bugs gets a shout-out on a zoom call.


  • I haven’t used tailscale to know how well it works but as a current zerotier user I’ve been considering moving away from it.

    I actually love the idea and it’s super simple to set up but has some very annoying pitfalls for me:

    1. It’s a lot of “magic”. When it fails to work the zerotier software gives you very little information on why.
    2. The NAT tunneling can be iffy. I had it fail to work in some public WiFis, occasionally failed to work on mobile internet (same phone and network when it otherwise works). Restarting the app, reconnecting and so on can often help but it’s not super reliable IMO.
    3. Just recently I’ve had to uninstall the app restart my Mac, reinstall the app to get it to work again - there were no changes that made it stop, it just decided it’s had enough one day to the next and as in point 1, it doesn’t tell you much over whether it’s connected or not.

    Pretty much all of the issues I’ve had were with devices that have to disconnect and re-connect from the network and/or devices that move between different networks (like laptop, phone). On my router, it’s been super stable. Point is, your mileage may vary - it’s worth trying but there are definitely issues.


  • Would you accept a certificate issued by AWS (Amazon)? Or GCP (Google)? Or azure (Microsoft)? Do you visit websites behind cloudflare with CF issued certs? Because all 4 of those certificates are free. There is no identity validation for signing up for any of them really past having access to some payment form (and I don’t even think all of them do even that). And you could argue between those 4 companies it’s about 80-90% of the traffic on the internet these days.

    Paid vs free is not a reliable comparison for trust. If anything, non-automated processes where a random engineer just gets the new cert and then hopefully remembers to delete it has a number of risk factors that doesn’t exist with LE (or other ACME supporting providers).


  • I applaud you for taking a pee sample.

    We had a vet once offer one “just to be super safe” and explained that there’s a special litter in the bag to make it easy. Then she charged us for it. And then she showed us the bag with basically a handful of litter that’d be barely enough to cover the bottom of the litter bin. It was then we learned to ask more questions upfront.

    We never got the sample.





  • I find this very annoying for groceries. My answer would always be no. But they installed this stupid system where your shopping cart wheels will randomly lock up as you’re walking out the door and the security person has to come unlock them, and it’s a pain if you don’t have a receipt.

    So now I always press yes just in case I lose cart roulette…



  • This triggered a memory. When I went to university one of my flatmates bought a fancy frisbee that you could throw super far, so as a form of exercise we used to walk to a large park nearby to play.

    Come spring when the weather started getting better, the park started getting busier. On one occasion it was full of kids (like 5-6 year olds?) and parents who ignored them. We tried to stay away but the kids kept getting lured by the frisbee that flies far. At some point one of my flatmates tried to hide the frisbee under his shirt to get them to leave, but one of the kids saw him do it and ran to him trying to grab it from under his shirt and yeah… as soon as my flatmate realised the kid was going to try grabbing at him at the bottom of his shirt he immediately threw the frisbee on the ground and held up his hands as if he was at gunpoint and walked away.

    It was pretty funny from the outside but damn… do I hate parents who let their kids harass other people. It was a much better experience when a bad dog owner was there at a different occasion and we had a dog chasing us around for 20 mins…



  • I have no experience with this, but happened to have seen an interview with Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas (an organisation for assisted death). The man is 90+ and still fighting for this right. I believe I saw it in a video format, but I think this was the interview - I think it’s worth a read.

    I’d suggest you look up the contact for the various organisations and reach out with your situation and questions to see what they say. They’re likely to be much better sources of information.