Since employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to, this post and emacs users in general, must be of such lesser value I guess? /s
The implications behind gene propagation being one of the highest achievements a person can aspire to are quite unfortunate to consider.
Regardless, I don't think anyone is going to, say, avoid a specific doctor because said doctor is fond of Emacs. Same for a plumber, a baker, an electrician, a lawyer, et cetera. As a matter of fact, I have a hard time thinking of any profession where a fondness for Emacs may be considered a bad thing. Perhaps a software developer may have a harder time finding gainful employment if potential employers find out about the preference for Emacs, though that would likely only be an issue among a limited and specific set of potential employers.
Never in my 20 years of programming, data engineering, engineering management of games, search engines, dating apps and machine learning systems I had a problem of people not wanting to hire me because I prefered Emacs (and linux).
The opposite is also true. I have never heard anyone climbing the ladder specifically because they are "so fucking good" with [insert whatever IDE/editor]
Dude is saying nonsense. "Emacs users are unemployable" sounds like "Tesla drivers unregisterable" - what an imbecilic, utter bullshit that has zero sense to say. Ever.
A few years ago I switched to KDE and the experience has been so absolutedly seamless and good, and the upgrade to Plasma 6 took some time to propagate down to distros it was well worth the wait!
It seems to be that a project like KDE might be in a very good position to make a very competitive distro simply because they are starting from the point of the user experience, the UI if you will. Think M$ windows, it IS GUI, and fully focused on how the user would use it (I'm thinking the days of XP and Win 7).
A KDE distro might be less encumbered with "X11 vs Wayland" or "flatpak vs <insert package manager name here>" discussions and can fully focus on the user experience that KDE/Plasma desktop brings!
That's exactly what's compelling to me as well. As an absolute fan of KDE and all its features, as well as stability. Who better to seamlessly integrate everything around a KDE desktop than themselves? KDE neon had potential as well, but I really like the notion of an immutable base system and less surprises during an upgrade.
It seems that it was only about time… it just feels like the pace of enshittification with big tech being able to get away with anything is crazy!
I’m hoping that projects like Precursor can take off because we’ve buried ourselves in such mountain of complexity that seems like only a billion/trillion dollar big tech company can make an OS.
But then again, some body called BS on browsers and we might have a good option soon in Ladybug!
Sublime is not open source and it has a very devout paying client base.
To me the dirty thing is to make something “open source” because developers absolutely love that, to then take an arguably “not open source” path of $42 mil in VC funding.
Open source allows it to gain adoption in the dev community. Devs are notoriously hard to convince to adopt a new tool. Open source is one way to do it.
The path is usually to have an open community edition and then a cloud/enterprise edition. Over time, there will be greater and greater separation between the open source one and the paid ones. Eventually, the company will forget that the open source part even exists and slowly phase it out.
I can see the point of sameness in homeschooling, but compared to traditional education? I’m not sure how much flexibility one would have to teach oneself calculus by 11 or the equivalent of an undergrad in math by 14!
That flexibility must be found in something non-traditional!
I’m no prodigy at all whatsoever but school was mostly dull and filled with teenager drama! Nobody knew what Linux was, cared about music production or anything interesting! The talk was which boy/girl whatever
its so much better nowadays. I"m 40 now and I'm low key jelous of kids today. Today if you want to learn to code, you have freecode camp and chatgpt to ask questions. Math? there's mathacademy and khanacademy. There are so many options now for learning stuff that we didn't have
Learning opportunities are indeed better. But time sinks such as TikTok and YouTube have gotten exponentially better (read: addictive). I think there's a higher overall likelihood that a kid gets trapped in doomscrolling than in Khan Academy.
I'm 36, but to be fair even in late 90s when we were kids we had
1) Forums like askanexper(can't remember the exact name)
2) great books like sams teach yourself in 24 hours and a habit to spend time in library
3) most importantly not as much competition as we have today. There were like a 2-3 kids in my schools of 2k who were into programming. Today that would be approaching half.
Very difficult to take advantage of if you don't have good control over your brain.
I am learning bit and pieces on how to do this but it's a long and uncertain process. Conflict monitoring is willpower is a new concept to me but it gave me a framework on how to improve my discipline over time.
> …the company's AI coding agent deleted a code base and lied about its data.
Well, lying about it certainly human-like behavior, human-like AGI must be just around the corner!
/s
But really, full access to a production database? How many good engineer’s advice you need to ignore to do that? Who was consulted before running the experiment?
Or was it just a “if you say so boss…” kind of thing?
I think there’s an element of fear in the self-taught engineer? I am self taught and even after over a decade of experience impostor syndrome is still going strong!
At the same time I’ve been surprised by graduates when they come across something and say “I didn’t see that in school”, like, what!? I thought the job was mostly learning on the go!
Effectively, not a lot. eBPF does have the capabilities to do more than a regular firewall, but this just seems to do an IP lookup in a blacklist file.
If you buy a fancy network card from a company like Nvidia, you could run the eBPF program on the card itself and the kernel wouldn't even see the packet come in. This use case doesn't seem like it'd need that kind of performance tweak, though.
It's useful as a fun project to experiment with eBPF, though!
Do you have a model number for an Nvidia offload card? I thought that only Netronome did them and that they were kinda long in the tooth now. I’d love to get my hands on one.
However, details are very hard to come by. Maybe the "offload" they offer isn't actually offloading anything and I've just misunderstood them when I last heard about them (and kernel XDP really is that fast).
It's one program that blocks everything everywhere, and doesn't rely on specific firewall configurations or DNS resolvers to be able to block requests.
And because it uses eBPF, technically (it probably doesn't support this yet but it could) you could block requests at the application level, even if it uses TLS, before it ever even gets to a resolver or firewall.
Taking that fact even further, this means that not only well-behaved resolv.conf-reading applications are blocked, but programs that use their own DoH/DoT could be as well. Your browser wouldn't even need an ad-blocker extension. Your local resolver and your VPN-specific resolver both continue to work normally while also blocking what you want.
> getting underneath TLS and DoH (which have both been effectively weaponized at this point).
Only to the extent you are running software you don't trust. If you're running a user agent (e.g. a browser), rather than an app, you can easily do full ad-blocking much more effectively.
Calling TLS and DoH a weapon because apps you don't trust can use them to maintain integrity of their connections is like calling secure coding practices a weapon because they make jailbreaking harder.
Yeah I'm just going to have to completely disagree at a militant volume. Keeping the contents of connections made on my behalf secure from my own inspection is fucked up and I want harm to befall those that do so.
I'm not a little angry about surveillance capitalism, I'm start a war angry about it.
I agree with your frustration, and just fundamentally disagree with your attribution of blame. Security is a feature. Software that works against its user is an awful thing. Security features that help secure software for the benefit of users do not become bad just because they also help secure software that works against the user. The solution there is not running software that works against its user.
Eliminating buffer overruns across the entire industry will also make it harder to e.g. jailbreak game consoles or iOS devices. That doesn't make it bad to eliminate buffer overruns; the problem is with devices requiring jailbreaking in the first place, rather than serving their users.
If you believe that TLS and DoH do more harm than good, you may be in a bubble where e.g. things like pihole are common, rather than being obscure tools used by highly technical users who tolerate and debug breakage.
I don't think there is any justification for shipping software with exploitable security problems on purpose, and it sounds like I maybe gave you the impression I do. I think all software should be as secure as it's feasible to make it.
But I don't think that security should ever operate against the person who bought the device and is sitting in front of it. I don't think anything on my device or anyone's should be able to phone home in a way that is secure from me: and so I am very happy with things like eBPF that make root mean root.
I think that there are certain things you do not do as a professional, as a moral person, as a person who wants to be proud of what you've done. And both TLS and DoH are now routinely used by vendors to do things that users don't know about, don't want, wouldn't consent to if they knew, and I think people should go to jail over it.
I worked in big consumer internet during the period when it was beloved, and during the period where it was starting to get sketchy, and at some point I walked away from millions in unvested stock because a line had been crossed.
Near as I can tell a lot of us with reservations left, and those that remain are those with few if any qualms of any kind.
> I think all software should be as secure as it's feasible to make it. But I don't think that security should ever operate against the person who bought the device and is sitting in front of it.
I don't think that software, in general, should place the interests of the software author above the interests of the user.¹ I just don't think that's specific to TLS or DoH; it's a general problem of running software that doesn't operate in your best interests. And I feel like laying the blame for that on TLS or DoH, rather than on the software author working against the user's interests, has the net result of making it harder to make software more secure, because it contributes to pushback against those technologies in general.
¹ Modulo some reasonable caveats and subtleties like following standards, which place one interest of the user above another interest of the user.
I think TLS and DoH are net wins in the world, due to all the positive benefits they have, despite the fact that they (like many many other technologies) are also sometimes used for anti-user purposes.
And, of course, if you control a device that includes controlling the software running on the device, which includes arbitrarily debugging, intercepting, or modifying it. I'm glad to see people who legitimately control a device using whatever technologies they desire to prevent software from working against their interests. (Though I continue to believe the right solution there is to not run software that runs against your interests in the first place, whenever possible.)
Well fortunately for user choice there are people like me who are going to build and distribute software that is not prescriptive about what certificate authorities users should be compelled to accept as net wins as well as people like you who apparently are willing to navigate a twisty rhetorical maze before arriving back at: status quo, intact.
my intention is to render your net win calculation irrelevant by letting users decide and educating them about the implications of trusting people like you.
