My general feeling of the last 20 years is basically: the intersection of security, infosec, and state sponsored threats has horribly impacted the usability of computers and made them much less enjoyable than they used to be. Everything is friction and pain and confusion now and I really hate it. I don’t blame people for valuing ease of use over security. I would greatly prefer to just not think about it or to have to deal with a never ending barrage of multi-factor authentication and things being tied to my phone number. It’s depressing and I don’t see it getting better, only worse as the arms race goes on.
OK, well, TO BE FAIR, I can understand why people don't necessarily like Signal. Here's what just happened to me when I dared to try to log in on both of my phones...
Now, all of the conversations I had on my other phone are just gone, and I can't use Signal there any more. Good job. Very nice. Good UX beats security every time.
Even after prefacing things by saying "I have no intention of leaving Telegram...", I've gotten a ton of pushback to the mere suggestion that I could use Signal as a backup. Multiple folks I've talked to were either super dismissive or outright hostile about it. Judging by the reaction I've seen today, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we are not going to see many furries moving to Signal any time in the near future. I'll still have it as a backup, but, like I've said before, it's a backup. I'm not moving. I'm just keeping my options open.
I really do deeply appreciate how easy it is to set up comprehensive filters on Mastodon, so people can carry on enjoying talking about a thing that causes me stress, and I don't need to see it.
The most important part of doing effective code reviews is knowing the difference between “this isn’t how I would have done it, but that’s fine” and “this isn’t how anyone should do it, because <valid reason>”
systemd has a reasonably good user interface to process initialization but I am still extremely fucking pissed off at how much it just continues to absorb other system functionality forever and ever and ever. It’s never enough. Process init is like a tiny sliver of its scope these days. And if you criticize it you’re instantly shot down as a “hater”
Every criticism of systemd seems to get responded to with “oh so you liked sysv init, you dinosaur?” And I say for the millionth time no, sysv init was awful and needed to be replaced, but it got replaced by something that is also not good, but for totally different reasons.
Programming hill I will die on: Java isn’t actually a bad language. Hating on it is just a meme that spread in large part because it became so heavily used by giant and excruciatingly boring enterprise systems, written largely by programmers pumped out of low effort trade schools. Despite all that, the language and the JVM are quite good, actually.
@tilton I have mixed feelings about it myself, having written :java: Java™ professionally for a while now.
My opinion in a nutshell -- the core language is just fine (if overly verbose), but the standard library is lacking, and the third-party ecosystem is a frustrating mess as a result.
At my current job, we have a lot of old systems-y Java code using custom frameworks and I actually quite like working with it! Way more than Spring and other overly-complicated behemoths, anyway…
So, I do have a Signal account, but it's under my real name and real phone number. I'm happy to share it with people I know but I keep it a little closer to my chest than other places.
More and more, online presence is tied to your real name or contact info and it's hard to have a separate online identity and real life identity, and frankly: That sucks.
@tilton I'm amused at the photo on the balcony that makes it look like the corner is a spacious, obtuse angle, when the overhead view clearly shows it's an awkward acute angle.
Infosec friends, you want to have nightmares tonight? Let me tell you what it was like to work in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s. I worked at SGI, a major computer manufacturer. When I started, I was given an SGI Indy workstation running IRIX 5.3. It had no root password, setting one up was completely optional. I had full control over all software installed on it, and I could install anything I wanted from our internal dist server, including reinstalling the OS. New OS patches were occasionally available, but finding them and installing them was up to you. That workstation had a publicly routed IPv4 address and was connected to the campus Ethernet, which was in turn connected to the public Internet. There was no firewall, so I could access it from anywhere in the world (and since ssh wasn't much of a thing yet, that connection was unencrypted Telnet). And finally, to add to your nightmare, every workstation ran sendmail and received email directly: you could email me at <name>@sgi.com or directly at <name>@<workstation>.corp.sgi.com, and mail would be routed to my workstation. And yet... it all worked! And if I'm honest, I really miss it. Bad people broke things and ruined the good times for everyone.
@tilton I kind of miss some of that even though I wasn't in tech (or old enough) in the 90s. Because it makes so much sense to send email to the username at the computer name you want to send it to. Or to have a an address that you can actually use to address the machine.
It does not make sense to use a web browser, which is actually an OS inside of your OS, to read and send mail. Or to open a port and not have it available, then allow it in your firewall and still not have it accessible, then have to set up port forwarding in your home router to actually be able to use the port. I know why it is they way it is. But I don't like it as much as your nightmare.
What I do like is VPNs in which a selected (or more or less random) group of interested nerds place free and open net, offers experimental services and stuff. It's the opposite of the internet idea. But semi-small communities are the healthiest ones and the ones where one can have the most fun.