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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Backwards compatibility - yes I agree, it’s quite good at it.

    Hardware specific issues for any OSes - disagree. For windows that’s 80-90% done by the hardware manufacturer’s drivers. It’s not through an effort from Microsoft whether issues are fixed or not. For Linux it’s usually an effort of maintainers and if anything, Linux is famous for supporting old hardware that windows no longer works with.

    But the point I was making is not to say Linux or osx is better than windows or vice versa, it’s that windows holds by far the largest market share in desktops and neither of the alternatives are really drop-in replacements. So in the end they have no pressure on them to improve UX since it’s infeasible to change OS for the majority of their users at the moment.


  • Aside from the effort required others have mentioned, there’s also an effect of capitalism.

    For a lot of their tech, they have a near-monopoly or at least a very large market share. Take windows from Microsoft. What motivation would they have to fix bugs which impact even 5-10% of their userbase? Their only competition is linux with its’ around 4(?)% market share and osx which requires expensive hardware. Not fixing the bug just makes people annoyed, but 90% won’t leave because they can’t. As long as it doesn’t impact enterprise contracts it’s not worth it to fix it because the time spent doing that is a loss for shareholders, meanwhile new features which can collect data (like copilot for example) that can be sold generate money.

    I’m sure even the devs in most places want to make better products and fight management to give them more time to deliver features so they can be better quality - but it’s an exhausting sharp uphill battle which never ends, and at the end of the day the person who made broken feature with data collector 9000 built in will probably get the promotion while the person who fixed 800 5+ year old bugs gets a shout-out on a zoom call.



  • I haven’t used tailscale to know how well it works but as a current zerotier user I’ve been considering moving away from it.

    I actually love the idea and it’s super simple to set up but has some very annoying pitfalls for me:

    1. It’s a lot of “magic”. When it fails to work the zerotier software gives you very little information on why.
    2. The NAT tunneling can be iffy. I had it fail to work in some public WiFis, occasionally failed to work on mobile internet (same phone and network when it otherwise works). Restarting the app, reconnecting and so on can often help but it’s not super reliable IMO.
    3. Just recently I’ve had to uninstall the app restart my Mac, reinstall the app to get it to work again - there were no changes that made it stop, it just decided it’s had enough one day to the next and as in point 1, it doesn’t tell you much over whether it’s connected or not.

    Pretty much all of the issues I’ve had were with devices that have to disconnect and re-connect from the network and/or devices that move between different networks (like laptop, phone). On my router, it’s been super stable. Point is, your mileage may vary - it’s worth trying but there are definitely issues.


  • Would you accept a certificate issued by AWS (Amazon)? Or GCP (Google)? Or azure (Microsoft)? Do you visit websites behind cloudflare with CF issued certs? Because all 4 of those certificates are free. There is no identity validation for signing up for any of them really past having access to some payment form (and I don’t even think all of them do even that). And you could argue between those 4 companies it’s about 80-90% of the traffic on the internet these days.

    Paid vs free is not a reliable comparison for trust. If anything, non-automated processes where a random engineer just gets the new cert and then hopefully remembers to delete it has a number of risk factors that doesn’t exist with LE (or other ACME supporting providers).






  • Not OP but some stores have these hyper-sensitive scales you put your bag/scanned items on. They can be super annoying as tiny differences in the weight will lock up the entire thing and you need someone to unlock it again. E.g. if you didn’t start with all your bags already on it and you try to add a new bag. Or the area is full and you want to remove and already full bag. Or you nudged something with your leg while scanning the next item.



  • Just a warning: the photo part of proton drive is incredibly basic to be generous and even that doesn’t seem to work smoothly (on android). Just to handpick 2 very annoying things aside from lack of features: opening a picture that’s locally on your phone takes 1-2 seconds, and when you back out it has to refresh the gallery view every time, which also takes 1-2 seconds - incredibly annoying while looking for the correct picture.

    I use it as a second type of backup for my photos, but I definitely couldn’t live with the UX the app provides. IMO the drive part in general is very lacking.

    I’m still happy with my proton subscription for mail and VPN, but I’d suggest you trial the drive part before committing to it (unless you already know it’s ok for your needs, in which case great!).



  • I have no experience with this, but happened to have seen an interview with Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas (an organisation for assisted death). The man is 90+ and still fighting for this right. I believe I saw it in a video format, but I think this was the interview - I think it’s worth a read.

    I’d suggest you look up the contact for the various organisations and reach out with your situation and questions to see what they say. They’re likely to be much better sources of information.


  • Maybe set up a script that runs locally and pings an external service like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 every second to see if it survives in a window when your services alert? Perhaps it’s your modem refreshing some config which causes a blip for a few seconds or something similar. If this doesn’t alert at least you can rule out that your internet fully goes out.

    The other side of this would also be useful, if you could run a similar check towards different levels of your home network to see how far down it gets (e.g. ping your router, expose some simple TCP echo service on the server running all this and nc it, curl the status page of the reverse proxy (or set up a static page in it), curl the app behind the reverse proxy - just make sure to use firewall rules for this and not just put everything on the internet). Depending on where it fails should hopefully give you some idea to go on.

    Maybe set up https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/ to see if it registers any packet loss in those times or increased latency (although I’d still do the above as well)



  • I get the convenience part so the staff doesn’t have to go around do it by hand, but it just seems infeasible to do it for the other examples mentioned.

    E.g. you go in, pick up item listed for $10, finish shopping in 20 mins, item now costs $15 at till… probably leave it (so now the staff has to re-shelf it) and start shopping at a place that is not trying to scam you.

    For the other example, if there are a few packs of something expiring and they reduce the price for all the items on the shelf, everyone will just take the ones which have a reasonable shelf life left leaving the expiring ones.

    Both of these just seem stupid.