• 7 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2023

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  • If I didn’t have some level of delusion a few years in, continuing might have been very daunting. At some point I believed I was the best but, looking back, I was just starting to get competent at reading documentation and moved away from trial-and-error. It was healthy in that I remained enthusiastic but I think it may have held me back sometimes. I ignored good advice from a very experienced person many times.

    Maybe there’s some filter there where you kind of have to inflate your opinion of your own work to keep at it? It’s better to balance it with some doubt, make sure your opinion is based in reality and continue to learn but, for those I’ve seen who don’t really do that… at least they’re still showing up. That’s half of it.













  • The list in the first one is so hilariously ridiculous that I have to remind myself how grave the accusations are.

    • the use of applications such as Signal, WhatsApp, Wire, Silence or ProtonMail to encrypt communications;
    • the use of tools to protect your privacy on the Internet such as a VPN, Tor or Tails;
    • protecting ourselves against the exploitation of our personal data by GAFAM via services such as /e/OS, LineageOS, F-Droid;
    • encryption of digital media;
    • organization and participation in digital hygiene training sessions;
    • the mere possession of technical documentation.

    I have ticked almost all of these boxes at some point as a privacy conscious software developer. I wonder what I’m plotting?

    The reality is, sometimes it’s not even about the state. I’m well aware that they are such an adversary that, if I were specifically targeted for something I would want to hide, I’m in for a really bad time.

    Sometimes, it’s about the data advertisers collect and use to sell me more crap. Sometimes, it’s about disagreeing with dragnet surveillance. Sometimes, it’s about refusing to have these very valuable services be associated only with criminal intent.

    Journalists, victims of abuse, whistleblowers and every day people just trying to have private lives have a use for some or all of these tools.

    Also, WhatsApp and ProtonMail have access to metadata about who you are contacting as well as subject lines and, in the case of WhatsApp, images. They might avoid some ad targeting but both are pretty stupid tools to use if you’re trying to hide something from the government. They both only scratch the surface of what we really need to avoid dragnet surveillance and yet are still better than many alternatives.


  • I’ve seen this raised quite often and, to be honest, it was kind of true in the beginning and that’s probably where the opinion came from.

    Ultimately, software like this is free and open to everyone; even those we don’t agree with. We’re going to have to come to terms with that fact because our own freedom rests upon it. There were going to be authoritarian left servers at some point, it just so happened to be at the beginning. There are also going to be authoritarian right servers if there aren’t already. The software doesn’t discriminate but it also doesn’t discriminate against anyone else.

    As for optics, I think all you can do is focus more on the beehaw community or whichever community you want to promote. This post was written to capture the spirit of the community if you need some inspiration. Some might not be convinced and that’s okay, we just need to convince enough of their friends :)

    If it really matters, suggest Kbin too. We can interact with Kbin magazines and users so Kbin’s success is Lemmy’s success and vice versa.





  • There’s some apps I hate like Instagram and WhatsApp, but stick around because it’s the only way I can contact some friends and family. The network effect is strong and I can’t really leave.

    With Reddit, I don’t care. If there’s enough content somewhere else, even if it’s a fraction of the volume (there was no way I could get through everything on Reddit anyway) then it’s an easy switch.


  • I used Ubuntu years ago and left after trying 11.04 (has it been that long?) because the new Unity desktop environment was awful and buggy and the release generally didn’t work even after I switched desktop environments. Rightly or wrongly, I came to associate Canonical with buggy bloatware.

    I like how reliable Debian is for my servers but the package versions are too old for a desktop. Even then, a few days ago, I had to install rust with curl | sh because Debian’s package was just too old to build what I needed it to.

    I distro-hopped a lot trying to replace what I used to like about Ubuntu on the desktop. Fedora has survived many reinstalls now. Like you say, it’s on the cutting-edge but it also doesn’t cause major issues most of the time. They’re also pretty predictable and don’t try anything insane.



  • I really felt this in my teens. I worked a summer job so I had money to hang out and a car to get there. My friends didn’t have money, though, so their only suggestion was to hang out at a park and I turned it into a walk. I guess we were lucky enough to have that.

    It sometimes feels like part of your 20s are the new teens. We’re increasingly restricting what teens can do, like driving friends around, “loitering,” etc. When I listen to my parents talk, their experience of being 16-18 sounds more like how my 21-23 went.

    I try to make the effort to at least see friends at a café some weekends now. It might not be cheap to get café coffee three times a day but it’s really not a bad price to sit and chat for a few hours.


  • It set my expectations a little too high I’d say! I really appreciate how they turned it into a profitable product too and it shows they have commitment to service when most of their secret sauce can be used by anyone.

    I think they now have a headless version called Heartcore but, as far as I know, it’s a proprietary SaaS solution. Shame, that might have been of interest to you otherwise. I also use static site generators personally, it’s less to worry about.