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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Definitely agree, but your link is protected by cloudflare (yet another centralized service destroying the internet) and therefore I’m unable to get through because I have privacy.resistFingerprinting enabled on my browser so cloudflare is unable to determine I’m human I suppose.

    I despire youtube and it’s monopoly, and I think it get’s an appropriate amount of hate on here and HN, but what confuses me to no end are the people who complain about youtube turn right around and constantly recommend cloudflare. Can someone explain what I am missing?



  • I would have more sympathy for Youtube if 1. it wasn’t the de-facto standard where essentially all video media gets uploaded to (which Youtube itself has done everything in its power to make happen) and 2. the company that owned it didn’t also own the most popular phone OS, most popular search engine, most popular email provider, most popular ad network, most popular maps, most popular online office suite, most popular airline booking, 2nd most popular cloud hosting… The list goes on

    Until a federated solution like peertube gains more traction I have no problem paying content creators directly via patreon, and do everything in my power to not pay Google a dime. Trust me, they can afford it just fine.



  • Can someone explain to me why I keep reading about people having problems plugging in USB A connectors upside down? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Per the spec, the holes always go up. They indicate the correct way to plug in the port. Not only that, but the printed logo on the connector also always goes up.

    The only time this is SLIGHTLY confusing is if you have a desktop tower where the motherboard is essentially mounted sideways, but for that case it just takes an extra second to think which way is “up” from the perspective of the motherboard.

    And before anyone says “who reads the spec?”, it feels like I subconsciously knew this for something like a decade before I even knew what a spec was.


  • Ah yes cloudflare: MITM as a service.

    It really depends on who your adversaries are that you want to keep private. The coffee shop owner + their ISP + your ISP, or cloudflare. Seeing as cloudflare MITMs an insane amount of the internet these days I’m way more suspicious of them than I am of the alternative. If you’re really after privacy I’d recommend self hosting wireguard or something.



  • Yeah I’ve played with git-issue and agree it’s not ideal. Have you checked out Sourcehut? It is entirely email based but with some pretty great tooling around it to make it more accessible.

    I agree that in a perfect world we have a separate open protocol for all of the non-repository related workflows/data, that has all the features we need. But the nice thing about email is it’s decentralized, and everyone already has it. And in my opinion, with the right tooling built around it, it can get pretty close to the same quality of life as a github PR, but also degrade gracefully without it.


  • The problem isn’t the version control itself. Obviously git continues to function and I can commit things offline in a plane. What I can’t do is create/review PRs or read/open issues. That’s easy to brush off, but the most egregious thing is the fact that this used to be federated over email!

    All we needed was more user-friendly tooling to make it easier for new college grads to start contributing to FLOSS, but instead of better email based tooling we got the centralized trash that github is today.


  • The problem is all of these apps are using proprietary APIs to communicate to centralized backends, which then deprecate the APIs and the old versions cease to work. Back when software was largely communicating over standardized protocols it was feasible to run an old version of software for years after it had been stopped being maintained, but protocols don’t make money, APIs do.



  • I haven’t used any flatpacks, mostly because they don’t seem to have a good solution for running terminal programs. (Also I don’t like that the application developer chooses the permissions to expose rather than the user.

    However, I have been using bubblewrap which is what flatpack uses under the hood to sandbox. This allows me to run both gui and non-gui programs, and I have the control of exposing the minimum required permissions that I’m comfortable giving an untrusted piece of software.


  • I seem to be in the minority here but I personally prefer using $ and # to denote root. I like this because not everyone uses sudo and might not even have it installed.

    That being said, if you already have other commands that are using sudo -u ... to run commands as a different user then it might be best to just be consistent and prefix everything with it, but if there is only a few of those maybe a # cp foo bar && chown www-data bar is an alternative.



  • Yes, it uses the Linux kernel, but usually when people are talking about running Linux on their mobile they’re talking about running GNU/Linux, which is way more free (as in freedom) than any android garbage is. For example it is impossible for me to run arbitrary POSIX compliant shell scripts on an android phone.


  • Personally I think Spotify is worth $10 a month.

    While I agree that there aren’t any great self-hosted solutions, more diversity in the music space is important. I refuse to use Spotify, and for me it’s not about price. In fact, if they charged more and actually paid their artists more I would probably hate it less. But overall I mostly refuse to use it for other reasons:

    It couples the company that delivers your music with the app you must use to stream your music. In my opinion these should be separate - perhaps an open protocol that streaming companies can all use and open source clients that can connect to one or many of them?

    Spotify made it clear that they don’t care about Linux users when they killed their Linux client. Yes I know about librespot, it’s only a trivial decision away from Spotify killing it. And unlike Reddit’s API changes, the backlash would be minimal since most people use the official one.

    It strongly relies on network effects to get everyone on the platform and keep them there. As mentioned above, this hurts independent artists because they are forced to publish their music on a platform that doesn’t pay well just because everyone is on that platform. But there are more than just network effects between artists and consumers: Spotify relies on social-network style antipatterns to keep users in their ecosystem. I’ve been told by my friends that I am “difficult” because I don’t use Spotify and they want to share something with me. That is Spotify’s manipulation

    Their official client is electron, I don’t want to have to run a whole browser stack to listen to music. Not to mention the fact that npm is plagued with supply chain problems and unless the Spotify devs manually audit every dependency of every dependency of every dependency any time they add or update one (doubt it), users are one attack away from being compromised.

    When I did briefly use Spotify many years ago I took the time to build up some playlists of music and randomly songs would disappear from the playlists when Spotify lost rights to stream it.


    I personally use Bandcamp for recommendations/discovery, and then purchase music I like to listen to and self-host it with MPD. It works great.

    I’m not saying this is for everyone, obviously streaming has its merits. But in my experience most people self host not because something costs money, but because they have zero control of the actual experience, and they want to avoid the vendor lock-in issue.