this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 week ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago (18 children)

Y'all, with Proton enshittifying (scribe and wallet nonsense), I think I am never going to sign up for another all-in-one service like this. Now I gotta determine what to do about:

  • Proton Mail
  • Proton VPN
  • Proton Drive
  • Proton Calendar

and I'd be forced to reassess my password manager if hadn't already been using BitWarden when Proton Pass came out.

Self-hosting is a non-starter (too lazy to remember a new password for my luggage). Any thoughts? Are other Proton users here jumping ship? Should I just resign myself to using Proton until they eventually force some stupid ass "Chatbot will look at the contents of your Drive and tell you which authorities to surrender yourself to"?

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

also, how are you liking bitwarden?

I really need to kill off my current password manager and bitwarden's looking like the least worst of current options (esp. when paired with something like vaultwarden instead of running a fucking nodejs sync server on the internet), but also some of it seems quite stunted[0]

it's gotten so bad that I've started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

[0] - no global hotkeys? the fuck

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

also, how are you liking bitwarden?

I am happy with it. That they only charge $10 a year for services I don't even need (I could use a separate 2FA app) and allow you to self-host is a good sign. I plan to eventually set up a workflow in Sway (Wayland tiling WM) with a CLI tool (e.g. https://crates.io/crates/rbw, or the official one), so the interface is not terribly important to me. I would definitely recommend trying a free account to see if it fits into your workflow.

it’s gotten so bad that I’ve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

I am in the same boat, except all of the software I've ever written has been TeX, or giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why ∞ is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode. So I am only theoretically up to the task, which is ... IDK maybe I should start grifting?

But for real, I have considered writing my own:

  • VPN client where we don't have to jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client, or finding out that their client runs like ass in Linux (Proton)
  • Password Manager
  • Config editor, so I don't have to edit /home/${USERNAME}/.config/sway/config.d/90-fuckyou-this-is-where-we-keep-system-suspend-shit.conf every time I want to change something. "Oh no you gotta edit the Kanshi config for that one." It's tedious to remember where various programs look for the config and whatever particular syntax is chosen (isn't this fucking solved with toml files already?)
  • An Android reminder app that isn't some stupid Taylorist metric-worshipping bullshit.

PS: There is Goldwarden which I know absolutely nothing about but looks neat. It does suggest that you could just write your own that is bitwarden compatible.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I am in the same boat, except all of the software I’ve ever written has been TeX

I'm sorry

giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why ∞ is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode

that sound you can hear is my despairing screaming[0]

VPN client where ... jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client

(not a pitch, but multiple commercial references) I really liked how simple tunnelbear made this for a lot, and also quite like how slick the wireguard desktop-style handling is (you can see this for example with fly.io's integration to that). I think there's long context here, and if you buy me a beer I could rant in detail

PS: There is Goldwarden

oh good, it's in Go, my other code allergy

shitposting aside, re the password manager thing: @self and I have co-ranted in dms, and about similar gripes.

so, by way of idea, loose laundry list for foundations/design: modern crypto (jfc why is so much still going "yeah gpg is fine"), crdt sync, a sane fucking language to build everything on, own-devices friendly (in the "you can sync device to device peer-wise" sense, vs the "there's a remote server broker" sense), and pretty okay(tm) interfaces for client building/extensibility

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I’m sorry

me too, also i lied/forgot to mention that my particular PhD situation is so fucked up that i went from pure mathematics to cuda

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

GPUs: not even once

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

That is a good rule. The GPU programmers seem to think this is good code and that it's well-documented. I am still pretty out of my depth in this field, but it feels so silly to me. There is this historical bullshit about fortran only allowing 5 characters for a function name, and that (combined with some appeal to domain-specific knowledge) is used to justify stupid, freshman level shit like

if uplo == 'U':
    # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for upper triangular matrices
else:  # just assume it's always U or L without checking, god forbid you use something modern like an enum, or even just a boolean
    # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for lower triangular matrices

edit: if memory serves, booleans were first discovered in 2011 by John T. Boole, which is why they don't show up in fortran

[–] mii@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

They have a CLI app though which you can hook up to dmenu or rofi or whatever to get global shortcuts.

https://github.com/firecat53/bitwarden-menu

Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway. I just use the CLI and the Firefox extension and it’s working solid.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago

alas: my main workstation is (non-slate) macos, and it's unchangeable for the foreseeable future

good to know those (already) exist as options, though. if I can find some spoons I'll try look around and see if there's maybe something similar I can hack up/agglutinate from what's around

Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway

I haven't even tried it yet because I'm real "ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh" about even the idea of a js-/ts-based gui client for my password manager. largely because I've met too many js/ts devs and I outright don't trust their competence and processes. so your post is definite motivation for me to eyeball some of the other clients too

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