TechTakes

also, how are you liking bitwarden?

I really need to kill off my current password manager and bitwarden's looking like the least worst of current options (esp. when paired with something like vaultwarden instead of running a fucking nodejs sync server on the internet), but also some of it seems quite stunted[0]

it's gotten so bad that I've started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

[0] - no global hotkeys? the fuck

last time it came up, tuta was the least worst of the mail options. it's not the same offering as proton's in-garden encrypted, but nothing is afaik. rest of it is pretty okay (I have some (not all[0]) domains on there)

the rest of the things I don't have a direct recommendation in part because [0] and in part because I don't use computers entirely like how a lot of people do. that said

storage: backblaze storage pricing is not bad. they might have a desktop app thing? calendar: caldav is a dark art beyond my ken - I haven't even got that shit playing nice on my own things[3]. fuck knows who does this well. vpn: mullvad[1] (has quite recently had another full assessment published). maybe njalla[2]?

[0] - I'm one of those crotchety fuckers that still has a whole pile of self-hosted things that have been going 15~20y

[1] - seems okay and to have their head on straight. haven't used myself.

[2] - also haven't used it myself, comes from some of the folks of the TPB gang

[3] - admittedly I haven't tried that hard because I don't need it much, but it is extremely goddamn annoying to debug from clients

It seems like it is a neat addition to a robust verification system, sadly they picked it as a replacement for a verification system. Ah the libertarian desire to build a thing but not be responsible for it.

this is such a mess, holy shit

and only on .com? I have some very pointed questions about the maturity of the verification program/design

The British elected a guy who wears a mop on his head. You cannot convince me that is his actual hair.

I still have occasional intrusive visions of Johnson busting into an unattended supply closet in the Palace of Westminster to steal a fresh mop head, shouting, "BLOODY LABOUR NICKED ME TOUPÉE!"

People probably asked the same question about the first Habsburgs.

Oddly parodied before it happened in the tv series community (the dad of the somewhat racist main character. The dad itself is very racist).

E: I do wonder what Javier Milei looks like if he would dye his hair

mild guess: "golden boys, with the the 30+ years required to look Politically Evolved"? and of course the selection factors involved from even just getting to that point and the stylist/image handling that that involves

there's also an element of the system does as designed, and there's an element of self-reinforcing delivery/production of these ghouls

FWIW I just got an email from GitHub announcing that Copilot is now free for my account (a very basic one).

I mean, considering only the relationships between words and symbols in the complete absence of context and real-world referents is a good description of how a certain brand of tech dunce thinks.

Debating post-truth weirdos for large sums of money may seem like a good business idea at first, until you realize how insufferable the debate format is (and how no one normal would judge such a thing).

Unfortunately it doesn't look like he was properly banned, just booted out of his session for having suspiciously-high APM. Now, the true eSports nerds among us will already know that high APM is a staple of high-level play in some games but is also an easy way to check for certain types of cheaters. Because of the association with skill in e.g. StarCraft it also became a very easily gamable metric if for some reason you wanted to feel like you knew what you were doing or show off for your friends and strangers online. For example, certain key bindings let you perform some actions as fast as your keyboard's refresh rate allows by holding down a key or abusing the scroll wheel on your mouse. This can send your measured APM through the roof for a time. My gut says this is what Elon was doing that triggered the anticheat program, rather than any amount of actively gaming or actually cheating.

Please note that the hard-won knowledge of my misspent youth has no bearing on how pathetic it is for the richest man in the world to be doing the same kind of begging for clout that I did at 14, especially since I'm pretty 14-year-old me was frankly better at it.

well, first you'll need a solid grounding in the theory of categories

I extremely recommend The Little Schemer as a gentle introduction to both programming interactively and to some of the fundamentals of computer science. some of the other books in the series are also good, gentle introductions to some more advanced CS topics too, but they all assume you’ve read through some of this one.

Andrew Plotkin’s Lists and Lists is also pretty good as a self-contained learning environment with a tutorial

other than that, I second the Python recommendation. another first language recommendation I can make is GDScript, the Godot scripting language. it has a very good in-browser interactive tutorial for programming fundamentals, and a very detailed manual once your learning goes beyond what the interactive tutorial teaches. game programming isn’t the easiest way to start in general, but Godot has a few advantages in this area: you can see an interesting result right away when writing code, its scripting language is very well-integrated with its tooling, and it’s fairly close to a couple of other languages in syntax and semantics (specifically Python) so your knowledge should transfer fairly well.