Awesome!

Is there a way to throw money at you yet? Moral support is nice, but cold, hard cash is hopefully also appreciated. If that’s a thing, point me in the right direction and you’ll have a little pick-me-up this weekend.

Yeah, Jan 1 2000 gang rise up!

Wait, your name isn’t SagXD?

I’m 100% in the second camp. Facebook having my ID is a much bigger issue than having my kids’ profile be public. I as a parent can ensure my kids’ profiles are acceptable, or mark them as private myself. I can’t ensure Facebook deletes my ID after verifying my identity.

Yes, kids should be safer online, and that starts at home. Educate parents and kids about how to stay safe, that’s as far as it should go.

Exactly. We use a VPN to connect to anything somewhat important, and anything truly important requires manual access and approvals. I’m in a pretty senior dev position, and if I lost my laptop:

1. they’d have to break my password or biometric login (disk is encrypted) - with this they get access to most of our code, but no secrets
2. they’d need to hack my phone to access any internal documentation or test environments due to 2FA
3. they’d need to hack my password manager to access anything non-documentation - code repos, prod logs, etc
4. they’d need to hack someone else’s machine to get access to actual prod data, which is probably what they really want

And I’m not doing anything special here (and I’m certainly not a security professional), that’s everyone’s machines due to company policy. We also don’t handle anything particularly sensitive, the most sensitive thing I have is proprietary algorithms, and we’d sue anyone if we suspected they stole our code.

Oh, and if they try to run something sus, it’ll send a report to our IT dept. I actually got contacted by our IT dept because I ran something unfamiliar (I really like my CLI tools), so they added an exception after personally verifying with me that it’s not a hack.

We have teams across the globe, both inside the org and outside, and we haven’t had any issues with security, and we do regular audits. Our security team isn’t particularly special either, I’m sure many other companies have much tighter security than we do.

pretty trivial to do so

Yup. We have to “badge in” to our office, but the secretary will buzz you in if you ask nicely. Also, if you walk in with confidence as someone is entering/leaving, they’ll hold the door for you. Or go in around the EOD when the cleaning staff are there and they’ll let you in. All it takes is a very small amount of social engineering and you could steal a ton of stuff from my company.

But most people don’t lose stuff like laptops at home or in their office, they lose them when traveling. Maybe you drop by a coffee shop on the way to work and someone filches your bag, or maybe you take a flight for work and someone swipes it while you’re throwing something in the trash. They’re not going to break into your home or your office, they’ll snatch it while you’re out in public and not paying particularly close attention.

Cool, glad I didn’t listen to my parents, who wanted me to work for Amazon. Yeah, I probably could’ve made a ton more, but I’m making plenty where I’m at.

I work 2x in office, less if I have a somewhat passable reason to not go in. And I can WFH for a few weeks at a time if I need to travel for whatever reason. It’s nice working for someone that somewhat respects me.

Eh, it’s about validating credentials match the records of the user account, it’s not about validating that the person using those credentials is who they say they are. In other words, it doesn’t mean “the person logging in is John Smith,” it means “the person logging in has John Smith’s credentials.” If you want to prove that the user is who they say they are, you’ll need a lot more than a password (biometrics are a start).

Sure, and we should absolutely indict Facebook. And ideally our government wouldn’t be so corrupt that it could indict our own government agencies from buying information from them in violation of the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 9th amendments (and probably the 14th).

Get an ad blocker, problem solved.

Laws don’t exist to protect the state, they exist to protect the people.

Also, what another country decides to do shouldn’t really impact what we decide to do. If China blocks our apps, fine, their loss I guess. But if we start blocking their apps in retribution, that doesn’t make us any better than them. We should be fighting disinformation with information. This means better education and transparent government-funded research and information. But when the US government is secretive and frequently caught spreading its own disinformation, it makes it hard for me to agree to block other countries doing the same.

TikTok should be allowed to offer its services here, but US companies shouldn’t be obligated to host them on their services, and the government should publicize the negative information it has about them so journalists can help the public digest it.

Cool, let’s ban Temu then. Nothing of value will be lost.

In all honesty though, I disagree with banning software, and that includes TikTok. I think it’s a terrible platform and I refuse to use it, but I think we need to solve the underlying problem another way, otherwise we’re just picking and choosing what speech is allowed in this country. The Constitution doesn’t only protect American citizens, it protects everyone.

That said, if we’re going to ban one, let’s ban them all. These apps haven’t provided any tangible value IMO and they’ve arguably caused a fair amount of harm, so I’m not going to die on a hill defending them.

Eh, I think it’s totally feasible to quarantine the problematic parts of tech and retain control. For example:

• GrapheneOS - I have a profile for my personal stuff w/o any Google services running, and then I have a “work” profile for things like Slack
• Linux - no software company or hardware company is going to restrict me from maintaining my own machine; I’ve replaced parts, uninstalled default software, etc; I currently use a Lenovo laptop and a DIY desktop, and I’ll probably replace my laptop w/ a Framework

“impossible to go without these services”

Have you tried? I stopped using Facebook over a decade ago, and I refuse to use anything else Meta has touched. I still keep in contact with those I care about. It turns out that if people value a relationship with you, they’ll work with what you’re comfortable with, provided you’re willing to compromise a bit too. For me, that means SMS and email is my main form of communication, though I’d prefer more private alternatives like Matrix and Signal. Maybe I’ll push my loved ones to switch eventually, idk.

No one uses fax

Nor should they, it’s absolutely insecure and shouldn’t be used by anyone. Period.

Mail is great, many of my friends have old-school watches, and while I don’t understand it, I have friends who watch live TV. None of that really interests me (though I’ll watch the Olympics OTA sometimes).

take back computers

What’s stopping you? Do it one step at a time, and make adjustments as you go. I switched to Linux full-time something like 15 years ago, and it’s all I use today. Since then, I have:

• switched from gmail to my own domain (hosted w/ Tuta)
• ripped all our DVDs and Blurays to a local Jellyfin server and cancelled most of our streaming services (SO convinced me to keep Netflix)
• switched to GrapheneOS after a few years of slowly cutting out Google crap
• self-host all kinds of stuff (I’m really close to eliminating Google Drive)
• eliminated all commercial social media, and only Lemmy is left

Do the easiest stuff first, and keep going until you feel like you’re in control. Your direction will probably look different than mine, and that’s great! But waiting for someone else to solve your problems is what got us into this mess, so do something, and ideally do it today.

I honestly don’t use it much, but so far, the most productive uses are:

• generate some common structure/algorithm - web app, CLI program, recursive function, etc
• search documentation - I may not know what the function/type is, but I can describe it
• generate documentation - list arguments, return types, etc

But honestly, the time I save there honestly isn’t worth fighting with the AI most of the time, so I’ll only do it if I’m starting up a big greenfield project and need something up and going quickly. That said, there are some things I refuse to use AI for:

• testing - AI may be able to get high coverage, but I don’t think it can produce high quality tests
• business logic - the devil is in the details, and I don’t trust AI with details
• producing documentation - developers hate writing documentation, which is precisely why devs should be the ones to do it; if AI could do it, other devs could just use AI to generate it, but good docs will do far more than what AI can intuit

Same. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near done yet. 😅

Exactly. I dislike Trump as much as the next person, but I also absolutely respect the office and think the Secret Service should be doing a much better job of protecting those who hold, held, or are seeking to hold public office. A functional democracy requires protecting those who the people elect, even if we disagree with their policies.

Exactly. They should be dropping anything that isn’t revenue positive or isn’t furthering the goals of browser. Rust is a great project because it’s being used directly in the browser. Mastodon isn’t, because it has no relationship to their browser efforts. I’m on the fence about the VPN, but if it’s revenue positive, it should probably stick around, and it sort of benefits the browser as well.

Yeah, something like 50k users is a drop in the bucket. It’s a nice size for a community, but not big enough to warrant a browser feature.

Exactly. I really like the term “vibecession” coined by Kyla Scanlon, because it really hits this perfectly. People think things are bad, despite all evidence to the contrary.

From the numbers I’ve seen, the average household (i.e. making <$70k/year) is maybe paying a few percent more on net than they were 5 years ago. Wages tend to lag inflation, so it makes sense that people’s wages would still be catching up now that inflation is pretty much back to normal. It’ll probably take another year or two, but it’ll get there.

Exactly, and my 5600 is still doing a great job. Give me a good deal and I’ll upgrade, but I don’t have a compelling reason right now to upgrade. Oh, and if I do need more performance, I can look at the AM4 X3D chip, which would be cheaper than getting AM5 and rebuilding my PC.