fps_doug

I think this discussion thread is basically people looking at this in different contexts. A lot of the replies seem to interpret your post as saying "systemd is more complicated than sysvinit was" which is most definitely not what you meant regarding your further replies in this thread. You seem to say "even systemd is too complicated for the layperson". I somewhat agree, if we assume someone totally not dealing with tech in any way on a daily basis, except for typical Office work. But the "in-betweeners"? They totally could. Like, not even Linux users, but curious tinkerers that fiddle aound with .ini files and registry settings to tweak their machines; do overclocking? They totally have what it takes to chew through a tutorial that tells you how to set up a Linux VPS with a couple services running.

For the layperson that's a bus driver by day, not so much, most definitely, but I think no matter how simple you make setting this up, just having to maintain this and having to do something when the setup eventually has some unexpected bug a few years down the line is just too much.

I remember back in the day, I preferred SP2. It seemed to run notably faster on slower hardware and there were very few instances of software (I don't even remember any) that required a later one to run on 2k.

Just think about that. There was a time where you'd not use an older version of an OS, but an older patch level of an OS and it didn't feel particularly wrong.

If you use a provider like Gmail, you're not just solving the problem on your end. Google trains their global spam filter through every user's behavior. So if enough people keep marking Cloudflare mails as spam, they will eventually end up in other people's spam folder by default.

True. It's stupid. :)

If you don't go through the hassles of anonymously signing up with the hoster in Russia, and also paying them anonymously, then there isn't much point in this. As soon as the server can be traced back to you (in a way that convinces the court) you're toast.

That's what seems to get a bit weird as time passes. IIRC, they aim at being NT5.2 aka Windows 2003 compatible, but if they don't support newer driver models, that would rule out using any recent GPU, as nVidia doesn't exactly ship XP drivers for the RTX 3080. Curious what their current plans are for this issue.

> If they had to eat their own dogfood instead, things would get fixed.

I assume they are using their own product. At FAANG size, these bad cases are probably just noise at best if you only look at the big picture. A hundred people losing access to their facebook account every week week is nothing if you have billions of users. So I guess it just doesn't happen to employees enough to appear to be a problem. And if it does, it's so easy to fix since you are facebook, that it doesn't even occur to most that this might be a very different experience for normal people. Sadly, a few employees caring and and maybe even occasionally raising their voice about this internally isn't enough. It's great they volunteer to help out, but as GP says, it doesn't scale and only works as long as it's a secret trick for people who know someone...

I've lost my YouTube account I used in college in another stupid fashion that should be easy to recover (or rather, verify that it's mine) if someone with half a brain looked at the issue, but we all know how easy it is to talk to a human at Google if you have problems with a non-payed account there, so I didn't even bother trying. Cousin of mine doesn't remember the email account she used when she registered her Minecraft account (9 years ago, at age 13). I payed for that account. I still have the PayPal Transaction ID, exact date of purchase, Account Name and UUID. They should be able to verify the account wasn't logged into for years. Nope, not enough. Well at least you could actually talk to a human there...

You are right.

What is a good idea however, is to implement a TLSv1.3 library in Visual Basic 6[1], that doesn't have any external dependencies, by embedding machine code for AES encryption generated with MSVC in the source code, that you patch into memory at runtime, by using all sorts of tricks to do things in VB6 that you aren't supposed to do in VB6. Yes, that VB6, that was released in 1998, superseded by VB.NET in 2002. Because Microsoft has just announced it's supported on Windows 11.[2] So when developing new software, why not use something future-proof? ;)

[1] https://github.com/wqweto/VbAsyncSocket

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstu...

It's still magic though, isn't it? The hardware was slower and more limited, but at the same time the GPU wasn't event that much of a GPU by today's standards, for example. You had to do a lot of what modern GPUs do for you by yourself, on the CPU, sacrificing even more of what little performance it had.

A modern dev would wonder how on earth he's gonna get Node.js plus a thousand npm packages running on this so he can create a WebGL context to start making a game. ;)

Hi, Windows Phone fanboy here. I've posted most of the below before. ;-) The sad truth is, that the new Metro UI introduced with Windows 8 specifically for Phones was pretty efficient and slick. A mid-tier WP phone was running circles around a mid-tier Android phone in 2014 when it comes to smoothness. Then we got another reboot of the whole mobile endeavor with UWP for Windows 10, which was more resource intensive, continuing the megalomaniac idea of having a unified mobile and desktop experience. And I don't think it's impossible to create this somehow. I just think developing a nice Phone UI and forcibly bolting it onto a 30 year old desktop OS that mostly evolved in gentle steps before was... stupid.

Anyways, the ironic thing today is that that whole UI mess Windows is in was caused by something that doesn't even exist anymore. These two disjoint worlds that lead to these jarring moments where you're thrown from that modern flat-clearly-coming-from-a-mobile-design-paradigm settings window into another dialog coming straight from the 90s. The new one wouldn't exist without Microsoft's botched attempt of re-entering the phone market! Without WP, we could have simply gotten more thought-out iterations and improvements to the plain old Windows GUI, with a desktop-centric approach, but more modern design philosophies. But now we have a mobile-first UI that is being spent lots of effort on to make it usable on a desktop OS.

And sure, I'm over-dramatizing a bit here. We got more touchscreens, convertibles, yada-yada that still benefit from these changes. But it was approached in a really twisted, stupid way, and I still don't know anyone who prefers UWP apps. Especially my old folks are rather confused by this and would prefer Windows still looked like XP or 7. Younger people might not care so much but spend all of their time in a browser anyways if they don't use their phones. Everyone else is a professional, and professional software doesn't exist as UWP apps.

Yes :) Not that I post very often/frequently, but that's the first time anyone ever asked about or referenced my username.

It's the same as the Opera Presto leak a few years ago. You cannot legally maintain or update, let alone distribute it. Back then you could find a few minor patches in Russian forums but that's about it. So even if there's people capable and willing to maintain it (which for a browser I think is an order of magnitude more work), there is no easy way to have a collaboration platform that also gives the project enough visibility, so motivation is pretty low.

Does work

The only language I ever really use IntelliJ for is PHP, and apart from minor issues that usually get fixed within one or two updates it's fantastic. Maybe I got lucky here, or maybe it's because every other IDE for PHP is next to useless, so it's easy for IntelliJ to shine.

Thanks for the insight. I've assumed hand written assembly, except for those parts where you try to squeeze out the last bit of performance, would be structured more like a human would think, but alas I might be wrong. :-) But then again the two games I tried were compiled with Watcom, which according to mmy research was pretty advanced when it comes to optimizations, for its time at least. The biggest turnoff for me was finding the right tooling though. It's not like there are many tutorials for reverse engineering, and those that exist mostly aimed at security research or cracking, targeting modern software. I found that Ghidra was unable to even load a Watcom binary, it crashed. A year later there was a patch for that, but then Ghidra didn't understand the Watcom calling convention. Found some incomplete plugin for this, but it was just blindly marking all functions as Watcom calling convention. Then I gave up. It might not be the best idea to start learning RE with a full blown game, but at the same time, if you wanna do this "for fun", it actually has to have a fun goal.

> With more and more SMP applications appearing, the day will come (perhaps in another year or so) when games, applications and the whole load of software out there will support SMP.

He was only off by a decade or so :-)

Very cool, gonna check it out at home!

I've always wanted to learn some reverse engineering and eventually do this with a game. Unfortunately the ones I'd like to target are all written in C or C++, so I guess translating the disassembly would be even more meticulous than it already is with games originally written in assembly.

Unicode

Just don't NAT again, but simply firewall. That's what I do. Luckily the days of routers crashing when there are more than 15 TCP sessions are over, even with the cheap ISP routers. But Wifi usually still sucks with those, plus security concerns, so I like to isolate it from the rest of my network with OpenWRT.

When I'm writing a C program I can somehow depend on only one library for password hashing and one for oauth (maybe two if it also needs curl). In javascript land it's probably a couple dozen, probably from a couple dozen different people.

Sure, it's not as simple as having one isolated reason, but would you expect the same outcome if you replaced the iPad by books and leave everything else the same? I'm having a hard time imagining this. Yes, it's multiple factors coming together, but nothing beats the destructive impact of too much TV/smartphone/tablet on little kids, except maybe severe abuse or actual drugs.

OTOH I noticed that kids < 10yrs tend to get overexcited or even slightly aggressive after watching TV. They're more likely to quarrel, if you have two or more. Obviously this might also depend on what they're watching, but if it's a TV show and they get denied watching another episode it does resemble a drug addict not getting their next fix somehow. ;-)

We have some casual acquaintance we visited two or three times. Their then-4yo was constantly on an iPad on YouTube Kids, switching videos every 20 seconds. Just watching him was infuriating. You had rather innocent or mundane videos of e.g. model trains driving around, but before you could start to pay attention to any details or any kind of narrative, he'd switch to a video of kids in a swimming pool full of orbeez, then something Sesame-street-like. And they just let him keep doing that since he'd throw a tantrum if they take away the iPad. They have to let him watch that stuff at the table, otherwise he wouldn't eat. Fast forward to last year, he got into elementary school and was absolutely unable to pay attention to anything. Teachers made him see doctors, he's on medication now, but that was half a year ago so no idea how things are going today.

Now I'm sure someone will pull the "are we sure we got cause and effect right here?" card, but even if that kid had some kind of predisposition, nobody can tell me that just putting up with the kid's tantrums when he was still four (or whatever age he started at, this was just when I first saw this) and taking away the iPad, going outside more would not have significantly improved the outcome here.

It sounds like it's a workaround for dealing with bad co-workers? You can still have these in async communication and others will just give up eventually. And then the guy who gets asked something but doesn't reply until at least two others pester him via phone repeatedly.

Assuming you have a well-working team, real-time still seems more efficient to me, at least at my current job.

To me, it sucks. (Video) calls are exhausting and less flexible, and nothing beats having a huge, real whiteboard and three people taking turns refining a diagram or flowchart while discussing it.

I'd like to throw in PhotoPrism[1], a web-based photo management tool. It's already moving forward steadily, having recently added a first version of facial recognition. The author wants to make it his full time job, but isn't quite there yet funding-wise.

[1]: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

But they said "didn't recognize the number", not "missed all calls and texts". I'm from Europe so I don't know how prevalent robocalls are; this story really sounds crazy to me. Sure, everybody has different life circumstances, etc. Maybe this guy was somewhat of a maverick. He said he didn't feel that lost and tried to get back on their own. But I still can't fathom how it never crossed his mind that someone might be looking for them, unless, as initially said, you get a dozen robocalls every day and this amount of calls and texts wasn't out of the ordinary to him.

> Are they using an environment variable shared by other Go prpgrams? Seems like bad practice...

Huh? So only set it for syncthing.

Yes that was annoying to me at first. The official client seems to still get updates, so you don't immediately see anything wrong with it, but has a couple really annoying issues that have been fixed in Syncthing-fork for years.

Syncthing supports introducer devices. If you mark a device as introducer, you'll automatically add all devices the introducer knows to your list. So basically adding a new device to an existing group requires everyone to agree on one introducer, and everyone will add the new device automatically.

NAT traversal and relay servers exist too. So seems it's pretty much on par with Resilio, plus open source.

Yes, I miss this so much, I actually stopped using Spotify about 6 years ago. This might be nerdy, but the feeling of instant playback was just great.

This Electron crap is really a race to the bottom, so you can hire the cheapest college drop-outs to cobble together some JavaScript to add feature number 1001.

On another note, this ludde guy is one of the few rock stars in IT to me. Had a lot of fun on ScummVM, played OpenTTD to death, used µTorrent in College, you name it...