There is nothing Oracle could ever do to convince me to use their services or software even if they were free.

Fuck Oracle, fuck Larry Ellison!

There’s a weird level of brain rot going on with AI. My wife recently had some troubles trying to research who owned our home in the past (it was built in the 1880s); she posted to a local forum asking for some specific information about who & where they were buried and so on and was getting replies from somebody that were seemingly plausible but just had no basis in reality when she looked into it further. After pressing him several times for his sources the guy finally admitted it was ChatGPT.

Just… why the fuck? Why would anybody do that? They wasted not only my wife’s time but their own as well, they contributed nothing useful (and if anything, their “contribution” was purely negative).

It’s baffling behavior.

In the Netherlands my electric prices have remained steady but gas went up substantially.

As far as I (a non-British person) can tell the actual proposal hasn’t been released yet so: nobody knows.

I do know that I wouldn’t count on them doing a good job of defining what “social media” is; and if we’re being honest then IRC, Usenet, forums, and Lemmy should all be included in that definition as they are all forms of it.

I started coding when I was 10 (yea, I know, that’s earlier than usual, but still!) and I learned so much from programming forums and mailing lists that I think it’s safe to say my entire career would be on a very different or VERY delayed path if I wasn’t allowed access to those until I was 16.

Sorry, you must be old enough to pilot a multi-thousand-pound vehicle at highway speeds before we let you learn about the dark magic that is Perl and awk.

Should we attempt to regulate how social media companies operate, educate children and parents on the possible harm and how to avoid it, or do anything with the goal of just improving the way technology is used?

No, we’ll just ban it. Something that has famously always worked well.

In a way this makes me a little sad. I met my wife via IRC, I built long lasting relationships with random people I met online when I was a teenager; I learned so much about programming and Linux/BSD/Solaris from online forums of people that took time to help my dumb ass out. All of that same potential to be swept under the rug because of trash like TikTok and Facebook.

One wonders why the application “used for everything related to authentication with government services” runs on a Private Sector cloud.

I read (no citation here, I forget where I saw this now) a while back somebody involved saying that their procurement policies require they accept the lowest bid tended, as long as its legally submitted and not obviously a scam.

So yes, typical neo-liberal right-wing mentality is very much at fault I suspect.

Since the article is in Dutch, let me try to provide a little extra context:

1. It’s not actually the company that runs DigiD, that’s Logius, who is part of the ministry of the interior.
2. It’s about the cloud-hosting company that DigiD runs on. The DigiD code was open sourced, though it looks like the GitHub repository is now archived (https://github.com/MinBZK/woo-besluit-broncode-digid-app)
3. It really is used for everything related to authentication with government services. Doing your taxes, scheduling an appointment with the city government for <insert anything>, scheduling a doctors appointment, getting a prescription refilled, on and on.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t DigiD created by Logius, which is part of the “Interior Ministry” to roughly translate into English?

I was actually just thinking about those the other day and how I kindof miss them in a certain way. Just a silly little break from daily monotony of writing code; wiggle the cursor a bit and watch a tiny cat try to catch it.

Best of luck! If you’ve got questions or problems feel free to DM me (or reply here) and I’ll try to help as best I can. I’ve been using linux since the mid 90s, so I have a decent idea of how it all works :)

I think it has some valid use as a tool in programming, though relying entirely on it (“vibe coding”) just produces a mountain of difficult to maintain crap.

What works for me is using it as tool like one could delegate to a junior programmer. I can write the signature of a method that it will complete the contents of; for example I’ll write “function reverseTextInSentence(string: text) {}” and tell an AI to implement that method. It saves me a little time and I can keep thinking about the larger picture rather than the details of reversing a string of text.

That said: do not let it organize the structure of your project, don’t let it name things for you, don’t use in place of critical thinking, don’t ever think it can actually use logic and reason besides repeating things it found on online forums, and don’t let it write projects wholesale. It’s a tool that can be useful, and you need to know when to use it and when its use will just make things worse.

Also fuck the AI corporations, run a free model on your own hardware.

Am I mistaken, but isn’t Nix a package manager, where Docker is a container system? They’re related, but really not comparable.

There has to be, the PasswordStore app for Android can keep the GPG files in a storage location where other apps can read & write them. All you need is something to handle the synchronization.

I’m a control freak and prefer to do things like that manually, so I just use the built-in git & SSH based method it provides.

That entry names are stored in plain text doesn’t bother me; if somebody has broken into my system so well that they’ve copied my password store then the last of my concerns will be if they can easily find out if I have a password stored for example.org or example.net. At that point it doesn’t matter if they can tell that I have a Jellyfin password stored, because that service is running on my server with clients installed on my phone & tablet.

And I handle key storage with a pair of Yubikeys which hold a copy of my private key. It can’t be extracted (only overwritten). There is a physical copy kept on offline, disconnected storage, which could be an attack vector – but if we’re at the point of somebody breaking into my house to target my password management then all bets are off: you don’t need to break my kneecaps with a hammer for me to tell you everything, I prefer to keep my knees undamaged.

For attachments I just add another entry; /services/example.org-otherThing - there’s nothing stopping you from encrypting binary data like an image.

And when it comes to convenience: I have a set of bash scripts that use Wofi to popup a list of options and automatically fill in data. Open example.org click the login field, hit meta-l, type example.org, hit enter and wait a moment: it’ll copy and paste the username, hit tab for me, then copy/paste the password, then copy a bunch of random data into the clipboard buffer like 10 times before copying an empty string another hundred times to flush said buffer. meta-f for username only, meta-g for password only; it’s honestly way more convenient for me than the 1Password setup I use at work.

I understand the point the video is making, but I think it’s irrelevant if you keep the private key on something like a Yubikey.

I use passwordstore.org which is basically a bash script that wraps GPG; but there is an Android client as well.

Everything is stored in encrypted files tracked by git. Files are synchronized by git/SSH to a server I run.

Police have had, since the late 90s I think, the “Hotplug” which is a special battery pack / generators that provide a special power plug where you can gently loosen the existing plug, slide the generator’s plug in place over it, then remove the computer from the main supply while keeping it powered on.

Power plug locks only buy you time or prevent casual mayhem; the police can work around those.

Absolutely. People really sleep on just how much traffic a simple low end server running a PHP framework can handle. I’ve ran systems with a million users (combined across multiple domains and clients but still) and it was just fine with a single database server and a few web servers. They would have needed to hit the tens of millions of users before serious refactoring or rewriting would have ever been necessary to consider.

I’m sure ‘serverless’ has a good time and place to be used, but in my experience it has just always been the worse choice.

“But we need to be able to scale!”

Sure, but we’re not in a place where we’re getting anywhere near early mySpace / Facebook / Google style growth. Just get a regular ass cheap VPS and stick your service on it; if you need to expand upgrade the VPS. If it’s starts getting serious then let’s look at compartmentalizing and distributing it if we need to.

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I suspect the big problem is that IAM (AWS authentication system) is affected and it is not decentralized, which is causing other systems worldwide to fail because the internal authentication is broken.

I can’t login to the AWS console to check on my stuff in the European zone, because the login goes through IAM in us-east-1 where all the authentication does.

It really highlights just how centralized so much of the internet is on like three companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google)

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I suspect the big problem is that IAM is affected and it is not decentralized, which is causing other systems worldwide (even outside of AWS’ us-east-1 location) which rely on IAM in us-east-1 to also fail. I’m having trouble even logging into the AWS console to check on my European servers.

Edit: IAM is the main authentication method. So AWS may still be up and running fine in other locations around the world; but if you can’t connect to them because AWS’ internal authentication is all fucked up…