dan

dan, 1 month ago

If the USA didn’t have such a complicated tax system, with companies like Intuit lobbying to keep it that way so they still make money, this wouldn’t be an issue.

A lot of countries automatically fill out your entire income tax return for you, and send it to you to verify it. If it’s all good, you just need to accept it. Less than five minutes work.

dan, 1 month ago

One of my favourite naming schemes is MikroTik’s. CRS312-4C+8XG-RM looks like a mess initially, but it’s very logical. The features of the product are literally in its name:

• CRS Cloud Router Switch (product name)
• 3rd generation
• 12 ports total
• 4C+ = 4x combo (RJ45 and SFP+) 10Gbps ports
• 8XG = 8x 10Gbps RJ45 ports (XG = multi gigabit)
• RM = rack mountable

dan, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

From what I’ve been reading, it sounds like they were malicious from the very beginning. The work to integrate the malware goes back to 2021. boehs.org/…/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdo…

It’s an extremely sophisticated attack that was hidden very well, and was only accidentally discovered by someone who noticed that rejected SSH connections (eg invalid key or password) were using more CPU power and taking 0.5s longer than they should have. mastodon.social/…/112180406142695845

dan, 1 month ago

This is the best post I’ve read about it so far: boehs.org/…/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdo…

dan, 2 months ago

I always found these anti-right-click scripts funny since they usually don’t block Ctrl+S to save the page, Ctrl+U to view source, or Ctrl+P to print (or these days, F12 to open the browser dev tools)

dan, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

and you shouldn’t be using any of those, since the order can and will change. The numbers are based on the order the devices and device drivers are initialized in, not based on physical location in the system. The modern approach (assuming you’re using udev) is to use the symlinks in /dev/disk/by-id/ or /dev/disk/by-uuid/ instead, since both are consistent across reboots (and by-id should be consistent across reinstalls, assuming the same partitioning scheme on the same physical drives)

This is also why Ethernet devices now have names like enp0s3 - the numbers are based on physical location on the bus. The old eth0, eth1, etc. could swap positions between Linux upgrades (or even between reboots) since they were also just the order the drivers were initialized in.

dan, 2 months ago

It’s hard because Mozilla need money to survive, and the world needs Mozilla, but it’s been hard for them to find a stable source of funding. Mozilla relying on their main competitor (Google) for most of their income is a massive risk. I can understand why they’re trying approaches like this, even if the users don’t like it.

Does anyone here have a suggestion as to a better way for them to increase their income?

dan, 3 months ago

I think some people don’t understand that software can be complete/finished and not need any more updates unless a bug is reported. Software doesn’t have an expiry date.

dan, 3 months ago

I saw a tweet that said something like “It’s amazing that somehow we were only able to produce a single generation that knows how to properly use computers” and now it lives rent-free in my head.

dan, 3 months ago

It’s funny but a obvious fake. There’s no such thing as “permanently” closing a Github issue.

dan, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Anyone that builds a SPA and breaks opening in new tab or history caching and back/forward nav isn’t a good frontend developer (or lacks experience, which is something that’s fixable!). These have been solved problems for a long time.

dan, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Keep in mind that software doesn’t have an expiry date. If a piece of software is unmaintained and doesn’t have an active fork but it still fulfills your use case and doesn’t have any major issues, there’s no need to replace it. Some of the software I use hasn’t seen any updates in five years but I still use it because it still works.

Edit: As an example, a lot of people still use WinDirStat even though the latest release 1.1.2 is now 17 years old.

dan, 3 months ago

A lot of Linux drivers are like this - just one or two people maintaining them. They usually eventually mainline the driver rather than having a separate Git repo though.

dan, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

This is likely legacy code. Firefox used to have a lot of issues with WebRTC, so practically all video conferencing systems blocked it. Teams probably has some “block Firefox because it doesn’t work properly” check that was written 5+ years ago and none of the current developers are even aware of its existence.

Well-coded ones did feature detection instead of checking the user-agent, meaning they automatically started allowing Firefox as soon as it implemented all the required features.

Feature detection is usually the way to go. If your website / webapp depends on a particular feature, check if that specific feature exists, rather than checking for particular browsers. Browser checks are still needed in some cases, for example Safari sometimes reports that it supports particular features but it really doesn’t (or they’re so buggy to the point where they’re unusable), but that’s relatively rare.

dan, 5 months ago

This type of printer exists. It’s called a Brother laser printer.

dan, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Hopefully that swap is on an SSD, otherwise that query may not ever finish lol
Once you’re deep into swap, things can get so slow that there’s no recovering from it.