namingthingsiseasy

If you ever feel useless, don't forget that both true and false have manpages in Linux.

They even have --help and --version flags in case you need them.

Looks like some people just don't learn from history.

I remember reading a blog post about how the Dutch kept meticulous records on citizens in the 1930s, including things like which synagogues people attended. Needless to say, that information became very interesting and useful to the visitors that arrived later in that decade. When comparing occupied countries during the Holocaust, the Netherlands probably was the country where the Nazis were the most successful in rounding up victims.

I can't find the exact blog post where I read this - I'm pretty sure it was on tutanota's blog, but I can't find it at the moment. Wikipedia however does include this line:

Several factors contributed to The Netherlands' higher death toll compared to other occupied countries. The governmental apparatus was left relatively intact after the royal family and government fled to London, and The Netherlands was not under a military regime. It was the most densely inhabited country of Western Europe, making it difficult for the relatively large number of Jews to go into hiding. Most Jews in Amsterdam were poor, which limited their options for fleeing or hiding. The country did not have much open space or forest for people to flee to. Also, the civil administration had detailed records of the numbers of Jews, and their addresses.

And now, they're making the same mistake again it seems.

First, we'll take away the headphone jack.

Then, we'll remove everything else!

My understanding from what you're writing (and from this article) is that the phone number is really the account number. That's all well and fine, but then they force you to verify that the number is yours (or at the very least, one that you have access to because you need to receive a confirmation over SMS), so you can't use something more private. And sure, it makes it a little harder to find your new contact, but I don't think it's really that big of a deal - just exchange your other "account number" via some other channel.

Besides, don't think for a second that when this identifying information inevitably falls into the wrong hands that it will benefit you in any way. "What are you hiding, citizen?" and all that bullshit.

The part of it that bothers me is the sense of entitlement that these companies exhibit. The "Give us your phone number or fuck off" sentiment is something I just refuse to accept. If Google forces us to do the same and we refuse, what makes Signal think that we'll do it for them when they're so much smaller by comparison? Especially when you're trying to claim you're more secure and private to people that much more tech savvy than average, this just comes off as not understanding your audience very well. I'm sure I'm not the only one that is holding out against using Signal because of this.

I'm surprised this hasn't been said yet... but what I hate most about Signal is its requirement for a phone number. I don't want to be identified, and I want to be able to create multiple separate accounts with different identities if I want to.

I also hate the fact that it's a mobile-first service. Yes, there is a desktop application (and just one really crappy one at that), but it's clearly designed to revolve first and foremost around your phone and be virtually impossible to use without one. As someone who hates writing on a 3-inch screen, this is a also non-starter for me.

I understand the arguments about perfectionism, but this is too much. I'll stick with XMPP, Matrix and IRC, thanks.

but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

The fact that we have a telephone system that works with separate providers contradicts this sentiment. If I want to pick up the phone and talk to my cousin's puppy in New Zealand, I can do that without creating an account on his provider's service.

I don't understand why we've forgotten this as a society. Yes, it was difficult to upgrade the phone systems over the past century, but it's worth it in my opinion. I really wish we'd start seeing government regulation that says "you should be able to talk to someone on a service without having to create an account on said service." I thought the DMA would do this, but sadly, Whatsapp still requires an account to talk to people using that service. Very disappointing.

The colors in the peertube logo are pretty hideous.

Are we claiming now that Activity Pub is the only protocol that we can use for the fediverse? I think XMPP is roughly 30 years old at this point, and I'm pretty sure Activity Pub is much younger than that. I could be wrong though.

But regardless, I don't see why Activity Pub has to be the only protocol we accept to be considered a part of the fediverse. It's not even like different AP implementations talk to each other all that well. My understanding is that Mastodon doesn't federate that well with Lemmy, and I haven't seen Loops or Pixelfed on Lemmy yet either.

I'd be happy to be corrected on any of this though, I haven't looked too closely into exactly how AP works or how it's supposed to interoperate with different applications.

Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their "standards" are blocked behind paywalls and can't be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).

Besides that, they happily looked away when members were openly taking bribes from Microsoft during the standardization of OOXML.

In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard. P1Y is a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here's a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601

Relevant (median salaries in the EU): https://www.levels.fyi/heatmap/europe/

The best UIs are the ones that never change.

It's good. The pay is good and it's very flexible. I get to work with some pretty cool technologies (especially Kubernetes). I'm glad that I have an opportunity to improve my skills in these areas where I'm honestly not that good. I work with brilliant people, most of whom are better than me in almost every way possible. I should be grateful.

But I'm bored. I feel like I'm just maintaining other people's work and that I'm not really building anything novel. I feel like I'm just tweaking and maintaining things that are already mostly finished. I don't feel like I'm learning as much as I'd like to. It's very mentally challenging too - which feels like it should be a good thing, but after a while, I just want to be assigned something that I feel confident that I can do without too much trouble or difficulty so I have some spare energy to focus on other things that I find more interesting.

I'm really wondering why I feel like I'm in a rut lately. I took a nice long holiday break, and yet I still haven't got much done so far this year. I've been sick, and still feel a little burned out from the inevitable pre-holiday rush. I also think there's definitely a bit of wintertime depression at play too. So I'm hopeful that things will get better soon if I just bear on and wait for a bit.

I'm still looking at new jobs, but very casually and being very picky about it. It's hard to say if the right thing to do is to change jobs or just change my outlook on life instead. I feel like the smart thing to do is to stay and wait for my mood to improve. I really don't want to change to a new job, just to find myself feeling the exact same way a couple more years down the line. But all the same, I just want to look around and see what's out there. As I go through the applying/interviewing process, I think I'll get a better feel of whether the problem is me or my job.

Sigh. Is it too early to retire yet? I'll be 30 in just a few more years, surely that's old enough....

Anyway, thanks for posting this. Would definitely like to see it become a regular topic!