I follow your blog from time to time and I appreciate it. Just with your recent posts I realized you have an active Lemmy account.

I was going to continue this comment with “But I don’t get…”, then I stopped and read your blog post again and remembered rule #2.

I think I get what you are trying to say, it’s good that there are some mod tools to help with modding, but they’re not enough, and even if racism isn’t as visible on Lemmy, people targeted by racism still exist and get hurt. So I guess your point is be more proactive than reactive. People don’t get that, and even if they are well intentioned, they think of all the defederating and banning examples as “good enough”.

Early adopters are also overprotective with Lemmy and its small community, especially when a newcomer directly questions “how is racism in this community?”. They found their peaceful corner of the internet (relative to major social media platforms), they know it has its flaws, but since the beginning they had to defend to questions like “who owns the data?”, “what happens with deleted posts / comments”, “is defederatation effective”, “what about that Lemmygrad which is hosted by Lemmy developers”, can mods and admins become too powerful", “how long till this gets the same fate as Reddit”, etc.

I’m not defending the behaviour, just thinking of an explanation. Because frankly, I’m also surprised by the downvotes and backlash you received.

So I guess what I was trying to say is, “Hi Jon! Keep up the good work!”

Please don’t go the RaspberryPi route for serious self-hosting, you’ll regret it later when you’ll realize it’s not powerful enough for ie NextCloud. It can handle PiHole for example (minus digging through the historical logs / stats via its interface), but when adding more and more services (Nextcloud, Jellyfin, a VPN, home automation, etc), it will be easier to expand via VMs (Proxmox) / Docker on a single machine that you need to maintain, you’d have easier snapshot backups, single point for firewall rules, etc, than adding RPIs. Buy a mini server, you’ll have flexibility, room for upgrade, and the costs and power consumption will be justified when scaling to multiple services.

I second the idea of a VPN instead of directly exposing devices or software to the internet. Requires more work and learning but it’s more secure. I would argue that well-known VPNs are more scrutinized and pentested than any camera software ever.

I’m rebooting my router every week via a crontab because some dynamic dns update process fails from time to time and I find it hanging. No time to debug the actual problem.

Yes I do, and a price increase of only $10 (so $30 vs $20) can make a big difference in sound quality for a pair of headphones for work (meetings and some music off Youtube). So it’s not even about hifi (at that price range, of course not), it’s about giving a shit and do a little research / testing before settling on a slightly better low end consumer product. Or, given a certain budget, maximise the quality for it, again, by doing some research beforehand, no matter what you plan to buy. But, most people are lazy.

When it comes to music, it also depends on a person’s tastes. Ariana Grande sounds the same to me weather played on Sennheiser headphones or a microwave oven.

UntrackMe, doesn’t open an app, but redirects to a chosen Invidious instance. I use farside.link/invidious which chooses a random instance closer to you.

Jesus, what a bunch of needless “security”. They’re tickets to a concert, ffs. This is all for personal data mining.

Yeah, missed opportunity that would have actually been useful at the time.

I assume blocking is supported by the server so it should be more optimized / faster. Filtering is a client-side feature.

There are websites detecting adblockers that instruct you to disable them in order to view the website. It’s a constant game of cat and mouse between ad companies and adblockers.

And I would like to not watch and hear 3 x 10 seconds unskippable ads when one of my parents wants to show me some 30 seconds funny cat fails clip on their phone.

As someone reading this thread, I’m stuck in an endless loop.

The rush on getting it working the first time is 👌

That’s so true, but what I think keeps us hooked in the game are the failures, the figuring out the "why"s.

Reading as a kid about virus analysis and how they work in a short column in a… newspaper. Yeah, they even listed full Windows Registry paths. Didn’t know what HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE was, didn’t own a computer, only knew about some DOS commands, but I knew I wanted to be able to do that job and decompile stuff (whatever that ment) and see how it worked. Just like dismantling (and ultimately destroying) toys to see the inner workings.

After finally owning a computer and being bored by the few games I had on Windows 95, being limited to Notepad, Internet Explorer (without an internet connection yet; or was it Netscape Navigator?) and Paint (in which I sucked, lacking any artistic talent), when I learned that I can just type stuff in Notepad, I borrowed a book about “programming” in HTML. Then Pascal, the pinnacle being a simple XOR encryption program, with a god damn white on blue “windows” interface with buttons (a la Midnight Commander). Writing TRIVIA “scripts” for mIRC channels made us gods. Then Delphi naturally followed, making my own tool to track how many hours I’ve spent on dialup a month (yes, internet was very expensive) while listening to 80’s music on Winamp. Nothing was more interesting than that. Then got a job and out of a sudden started making my own money by writing Delphi code. Up until then I wasn’t really aware that my passion would also bring food on the table. The rest is history.

Programming in those days felt unreal. Felt like The Matrix. I knew that what I want to do for the rest of my life is look at text on a screen, hit CTRL+F9, see a crash, set some breakpoints, and ponder around the room or while taking a piss about what went wrong and how to solve it. I’m no Einstein, but I understood why science people dedicate their lifes to their work and disregard completely their social life.

Deleting my social media accounts, migrating from yahoo/google mail, using a password manager, using an ad blocker, frequent backups, all kinds of scripting automations for work, Plex, home automation, learning to fix stuff around the house by myself (some plumbing, some electrical, whatever is safe and easier - it’s hard to come by a good, available specialist these days).

My take: actual, hands-on programming is way more rewarding than reading and watching tutorials.

I learned a lot at work (80% still self-tought, rest from interaction with other teams and other people better than me and with greater experience), and it usually came from needing to make my job easier, not to please the clients or management (scripting and automating things, Linux, DevOps, etc).

The other part through personal projects (again, out of need). You need to take on a project with real use to you. And you get to use the latest frameworks / technologies which you might not at your workplace, depending on the company. Working on personal projects will give you a different kind of fulfillment and will keep you remember that you love to code. Work is work, play is play.

And last, contributions to public, open-source projects. You need to read and understand other people’s code, get familiar with Github, write clean, documented code and respect the standards for the project. It will help you in the long run, and you could also add something to your CV.

As for the actual things to learn, don’t get stuck on learning just the framework, which does a lot for you out of the box by running commands or calling packages. Try to go in-depth in a programming language and play with the bare-bones, learn the intricacies. Learn for example how code runs and where. I have colleagues still thinking that queues are magical and asynchronous, they write a few lines of code and just work when deployed, without any actual knowledge of the architecture of the system they run on, this leading to no thought in optimization and speed of their code. Or they use the ORM exclusively, which, again, doesn’t help when shit hits the fan and you need to debug and optimize for bulk processing.

Also, learn a bit about cryptography and cyber security, even if only for yourself as a hobby. This is where I see a lot of developers lacking, to the point that most don’t know the difference between hashing and encryption. There is no project nowdays in the universe where security doesn’t matter.

The difference between a mediocre programmer and a good one might not be obvious during an interview, but they will show during the trial period.

Don’t buy makeup, buy yourself some backup.

Tanks for this, first time I learn about Rosie, seems promising.

We return / display the translation key name if no translation is available for that language, including for the default (English).

Also, on dev / test environments we can enable a config (.env) setting to append the text " [UNTRANSLATED]" to every value that doesn’t have a translation, as they’re easier to spot in the website / interface.

I’m talking about a PHP /Laravel project so it was easy to override the default translation engine behaviour.

Yep, seems like it. Another shitty thing by Google. So I’m not seeing an average of 2M reviews, the fucking count that’s placed just below the score, purposefully to mislead me, but god knows how many hundreds of reviews of the same old phone model that I use. And who knows how “recent” or how broad that “region” is.

I’ve heard this before, but a few days ago I saw it was at 4.2 and today is at 4.0 on Google Play. Am I seeing a different rating than everyone else? I don’t get it.