Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

  • 7 Posts
  • 1.78K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle







  • It really depends, most people end up specializing into specific things they work on as software has generally become too big for single developers. We have people that only do frontend stuff so things look nice on the website, some only deal with the database and making sure we return results as efficiently as possible.

    I started off doing the typical full stack but I’ve since branched off into DevOps so now I’m responsible for a few hundred servers across the globe that I keep updated and running smoothly.

    Sometimes I work on new tools, sometimes I spend days tracking down weird problems, sometimes I’m rushing hotfixes because something is repeatedly crashing in production.

    It’s worth noting that because you can click through UIs these days doesn’t mean that scales as you go. You can go spin up your app in a container in the cloud mostly through UI, but soon enough the defaults aren’t enough. I manage several hundreds of instances across a few clouds, I’ll well, well past clicking next next next finish. It’s just an easy and visual way to ease you into things, especially for beginners, as all the options available to you are there to see along with little help tooltips explaining what a setting does.

    It also depends on what you do: if you work at a startup, clicking through Cloudflare’s dashboard is more than enough. When you have thousands of customers, you’re not managing the tens of thousands of settings you have to configure, you automate.

    Code can describe things (HTML, CSS, HCL), code can configure things (YAML, JSON, Ansible), code can program things (PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc), code can query things (SQL), programming as a whole is very wide.


  • It’s meant to protect the software, not the hardware. Of course you can still put a hardware keylogger on it.

    You’re also only considering the use case of the owner and user being the same person. In a business context, the user and the owner are two different persons. It can be used to ensure the company’s MDM and security software aren’t tampered with, for example if you try to exfiltrate company data. In that situation, even if you have a keylogger, it doesn’t help you much, it still won’t allow you root access on the machine, because the user of the machine doesn’t have root access either.

    Same with servers: you don’t even care if the hardware is keylogged, nobody’s ever using the local console anyway. But it’ll tell you if a tech at the datacentre opened the case, and they can’t backdoor the OS during a planned hardware maintenance.

    Same with kiosk machines: you can deface the hardware all you want, the machine’s still not gonna let you order a free sandwich. If you buy one off eBay you can bypass secure boot and wipe it and use it, but it won’t let you sneak a USB on it while nobody’s watching and attack the network or anything like that.

    But yes, for most consumers it’s a bit less useful and often exploited in anti-consumer ways.



  • If we deleted everything written by insufficiently pure developers, we wouldn’t have a Linux desktop. Especially if we count the ones that were smart enough to not bring up anything political in public.

    Not a fan of DHH, but then you delete Rails then there’s no GitHub, GitLab, Mastodon, and many many other things given how popular Rails is, and that’s just that one guy.

    If you include all the sketchy stuff that happens in the supply chain mining the minerals, processing, assembly all the way up to the final computer product, you just can’t morally justify supporting any manufacturer either.

    This really doesn’t do anything useful other than feeling good to not support one of those guys. If anything it just adds extra political drama that feeds into a much bigger worldwide division problem.





  • Arguably, if it was normal to sideload apps it wouldn’t be as much of a barrier to users, but they’ve been conditionned to think they need an app and the only place you can ever get them is the store.

    It’s a technical hurdle only because Apple decided they want to control everything, and same on Android because of Google’s ever increasing war on sideloading. You used to download an APK from the browser and it would go like “This is an app! Install?”, but now you have to go enable third party installation and all that, and now the whole Play Protect forcing developer validation coming up.





  • There’s still people not throwing those in the blue bin? Why?

    I think the deposits are kinda dumb: it’s annoying to have to pile up the cans to bring them somewhere for a few dollars when the city picks up unlimited recycling.

    I think Ottawa does it right: you don’t get much trash space, so you have to use the most out of the recycling bins and the compost bin. These days we average at half a trash bin (~60L) of trash every 2 weeks.

    I already separate paper recycling and cans/plastics/glass, if they want cans separately they just have to introduce another separate bin for those and call it a day.

    Monetary rewards only work on poorer people that could use the extra 5 bucks trip. Convenience wins the middle class, and that’s in the form of a bin they collect curbside like the rest.