• 1 Post
  • 19 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • with mass services requiring mandatory phone number binding I think being in user mass is a viable option - you cannot get reliable “secondary” email anymore and people don’t look through data leak dumps by eyes anyway, script doesn’t care about email address string - it all becomes hash anyway. Whois protection is pretty reliable to divert snooping 3rd-parties.

    As for expensive… yeah, sad state of affairs is that there’s nothing cheap about hosting your own infrastructure. Price of not really trusting anyone or having obscure technical requirements.


  • Encryption in transit is pretty much solved these days with TLS, what OP wants is E2E - encryption from sender to recipient with no intermediate parties having an idea about contents of the message. Problem with E2E is inconvenience: emails are inaccessible without private keys and key management is pain. Users don’t want additional headache of managing their keys between bajillion of devices where they might use emails






  • Programming knowledge is largely irrelevant, as in to gain sensible benefits from it you have to be generalist software engineer with decade+ of experience of seeing it all. Then yeah, you can read any code, any stack traces and figure out the intent of developers of the system and what is undocumented/incorrectly documented.

    Focusing on one particular language is the right and wrong answer at the same time. Wrong in a sense that you’ll have to pick up other languages along your journey anyway and right because you need to achieve mastery in one of them to get to more advanced programming topics. Pick a language that you have fun using and don’t care about anything else.

    As for what to learn for self-hosting… Linux (pick a distro, let’s say ubuntu LTS w/o gui, ssh there and get comfortable with it. It includes installation, filesystems, RAID setups), networking, HTTP/S (that’s the main thing you’ll be interacting with as self-hoster and knowing various nuances of reverse proxying is a must), firewalling, basics of security and hardening, docker, monitoring, backups.



  • I get where you are coming from, however it's important to remember that big players are not equal - they have really, really different people in the leadership. Elmo is just a too-big-to-fall clown with insane ego, spez is a manchild who took VC money like there's no tomorrow and in the end had no idea how to provide ROI, but youtube is ran by very competent people with solid track record and deep pockets.

    Maybe they are not too innovative business-wise recently… but they are good at catching up (except live streaming - screen layout is dogshit and nobody wants to get hyped in their tiny chatbox from a fucking google account with family photo as an avatar) and at leveraging what they already have, which is quite a lot, tbh.





  • Just because you're paid well doesn't mean others are not being mistreated

    FTFY
    without unions there could be a huge salary disparity between devs in the same role, in the same company, even in the same project. I've personally witnessed more than 2x, heard about even more.

    Sometimes it's more than justified with individual's performance and impact, sometimes it's not. Some people are just better skill-wise, some people are better at applying pressure on their employer, holding business-critical knowledge hostage or simply negotiating.

    Point here is - while unionizing might make things better on average, there would be a very real pushback from people who are benefitting from current system and this is not necessarily management. For management in some cases it would be even a net benefit, since they don't have to deal with primadonnas and someone tying things to themselves just for leverage.