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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • All your old stuff will stay visible even after lemm.ee goes down, but it won’t be linked with whatever new user you create on another instance.

    If export and import of posts and comments was possible it would result in “duplicating” your posts and comments to your new account, which as you might imagine would be an absolute mess (not to mention technically infeasible - how would comment chains with other users work?) so you can presumably understand why it isn’t.

    It’s quite annoying for sure (and I’m a lemm.ee user too, so I’m also annoyed with everything I’m losing) but this is the trade-off we accept with federation that allows Lemmy as a whole to be robust and keep going even without lemm.ee



  • Wireguard doesn’t necessarily need to have those limitations, but it will depend in part how your VPN profile is set up.

    If you configured your wireguard profile to always route all traffic over the VPN then yeah, you won’t be able to access local networks. And maybe that’s what you want, in which case fine :)

    But you can also set the profile to only route traffic that is destined for an address on the target network (I.e your home network) and the rest will route as normal.

    This second type of routing only works properly however when there are no address conflicts between the network you are on (i.e. someone else’s WiFi) and your home network.

    For this reason if you want to do this it’s best to avoid on your own home network the common ranges almost everyone uses as default, i.e. 192.168.0.* and 10.0.0.*

    I reconfigured my home network to 192.168.22.* for that reason. Now I never hit conflicts and VPN can stay on all the time but only traversed when needed :)


  • OP specifically said they don’t want to dual boot, and I honestly understand why they would say that.

    When you dual boot you need to worry about what bootloader is in use and how it is set up. You might find yourself in a situation where you later decide to move fully to Linux and use the old Windows drive as storage but you can’t because if you wipe it then everything stops working.

    Windows has even been known to destroy dual boot setups occasionally during Windows updates.

    All very solveable if you have the right knowledge, but if you want to keep your life simple then swapping hardware has guaranteed safety (nothing can go wrong with the contents if a drive if it’s not plugged in, after all) and it’s very predictable and understandable.



  • I love how the top two points, “Choose how you search, right from the address bar” and “Keep your original search visible” are things that we always had by default in the old days with the separate search bar, until Firefox blindly copied Chrome and went to the unified bar.

    And now it’s back as if it’s some kind of revolutionary feature, rather than they made it worse and now they’re making it better again.

    Not that I ever stopped using the separate search field, I always turn that on.



  • The idea there should be some definitive, canonical domain for the Fediverse is somewhat at odds with the core tenents of the Fediverse itself - decentralisation, and no single point of ownership or control. And on that basis, we absolutely should not care about a particular domain, or assign any level of ‘specialness’ to it.

    I understand your worry - that some ‘bad actor’ could buy the domain and do something anti-Fediverse with it and mislead the public, but my response would be to simply not worry. The strength of the Fediverse is that we are diverse and unbothered by whatever nonsense some centralised platform is trying to pull. We don’t have a profit motive. We don’t care.

    People who want to find the real Fediverse will absolutely still find us, all on their own, regardless of who owns some random domain :)


  • I agree that it’s a huge fuck up, my comment wasn’t in defence of the post office, just a related story :)

    Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn’t us to come do it) because that’s the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.


  • I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.

    Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.

    This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.

    We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!

    It’s a mess.


  • Here’s my take.

    What the author is saying is true in terms of the ‘downsides’ of frameworks - they force coupling, dictate the way in which you write your code, and make it difficult to move to any different framework.

    But that doesn’t mean frameworks are inherently bad.

    I recently used the Kivy graphics framework to build a GUI app in python. Yes, this means I have to structure my app the way Kivy wants it to be, but it also means I get a huge amount of heavy lifting done for free. Kivy takes care of rendering graphics, bubbling user input through the component hierarchy, all the underlying tricky stuff, and means I can focus my time where I want to; adding functionality.

    Frameworks control the way you code, but in return they let you get going very quickly.

    The prescriptive nature of frameworks can also be a huge boost in a commercial setting, because it makes it easy for developers to work together with a common understanding on what they are doing. If someone has built a mobile app in React Native and they move to another team that is also building apps in React Native, they know what they expect to see when they clone the repo. It’s not a fresh learning curve every time.

    The negatives the author calls out are totally valid, but IMO there are upsides to consider too.


  • I understand what it’s saying, though.

    In the “old days”, when you sent someone a file, that file would end up with them on their computer, but generally nowhere else unless that person actively chose to send it somewhere else - which they generally wouldn’t as we are assuming they are a non-malicious human being who respects your privacy.

    Nowadays, ending a file to someone usually means that file getting synced into their cloud storage, and now with things like recall, seen by some AI and used for whatever purposes, over which you have absolutely zero control.




  • Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

    Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

    I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

    In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.

    When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

    So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.


  • The person you replied to isn’t entirely wrong, though.

    “ricing” was a term in use in the car modding scene around the 80s and 90s especially, where among certain groups it was popular to modify Japanese import cars with kits and decals etc to mimic the look of the Japanese racing scene.

    Some people considered these mods to be tacky and worthless because they usually tended to focus more on aesthetics than performance, purely tricking the car up visually with no other changes. Due to the Asian origin of these mods and the stereotype that Asians eat a lot of rice, the cars were insultingly dubbed “rice burners” or " ricers" and the process of doing it “ricing”

    It was intended 100% as an insult, basically meaning “Your car looks like shit because of all that Japanese crap you put on it”

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

    Like many insults of course, the insult is often “reclaimed” by the group it targets, who begin to use it between themselves in a favourable way, without any insult or negative connotation.

    Ricing in the context of computers where people are styling, theming and “tricking out” their desktop almost certainly was borrowed from the car scene.

    By this point there is basically no negative intent around the term at all, and especially not racist, but the place the term came from was.