Derpelopment 11 months ago in Quotes
The whole IT ecosystem has become a hail mary. Even admins usually have no idea what a certain program actually wants to do. If the admin knows how to install the app so that it actually runs, you call them a good admin.
From a security point of view, an application is like a nuclear power plant. It's good if it works as planned, but if something blows up it endangers your whole enterprise.
The whole container movement can be seen as putting the apps in a sarcophagus like Chernobyl. That way the radiation hopefully stays in, but history has shown that it really doesn't. Also, the wheel of history has just turned one more iteration and now admins just view the sarcophagus as something you deploy as you previously deployed the app. Who is responsible that it is air tight? Well, uh, nobody, really.
2 years ago in Quotes
Did you see that the top post on HN for a decent chunk of yesterday was celebrating that they were getting 200 rps? 200 rps was not something to brag about to your parents 15 years ago, but half of HN seems to have never heard of serving a static file through Nginx.
I don't want to be overdramatic but it confused the hell out of me and it made me worry about the industry. How can you have all these people cargo-culting into frameworks and languages and they don't know the fundamentals?
2 years ago in Quotes
Recently I needed to retrieve a zip file of some old work attached to my copy of an email that I sent to someone in 2011, using Gmail. It wouldn't let me, because the attachment contained "a potentially dangerous file". It informed me that "If you're sure the file is safe, you can ask the sender to upload the file to Google Drive." So somehow I'm supposed to send a message back in time to myself and tell him to upload the file to a service which didn't even exist yet? Absolutely ridiculous.
After a long and extremely frustrating conversation with a support person I was able to establish that the "dangerous" file was... JavaScript. They retroactively banned all .js files without warning. I tried forwarding it to a different email provider: forbidden. "For security reasons, Gmail does not allow you to use this type of file as it violates Google policy for executables and archives."
2 years ago in Things
We run these applications in cloud-native environments with virtual displays and stream the video directly to the browser while the user's input context (mouse, keyboard, etc) is forwarded to these applications in near real-time. The platform has a very generous free plan for all free applications and as we improve our cloud we intend to make all free applications fully free always.
2 years ago in Quotes
I live in Eastern Europe. A local city with a population of 300-400k was hit with a near total ransomware attack. The hackers asked for 400 bitcoin.
The mayor answered to them on TV "You fools, we still do most things on paper here ! We'll just spend the week-end installing windows and word and F** Y* !!!"
3 years ago in Quotes
Personal data, access to it, the right to spy on millions of people, carried out by the private sector, is now being fought over by nation states. Younger generations should be up in arms over surveillance. Instead, at least in the US, they want to use these apps and work for these shameful companies. Older generations, who should know better, are willingly using Alexas and the like. Interesting times.
3 years ago in Quotes
People blame developers but it's all driven by a product mentality that favors rapid iterations and technical debt to run business experiments on customers. Slow-and-steady, carefully written software isn't tolerated within many product orgs these days.
3 years ago in Quotes
Apple values my blood sweat and tears at $0.99/user/lifetime - 30% Apple tax - government taxes.
I don't mean to compare it to a sweat shop, because I live in the first world and have opportunities, but this is a demeaning shakedown and devaluation of my pride, product, and work.
Apple:
1. Shifted where generic computing happens
2. Downplayed the web as the end-all, be-all of application delivery. (It could have been amazing with WASM and sandboxing back in the 00's!)
3. Prevents generic apps from gaining distribution outside of Apple's control and tax
They took advantage of open source, the web, and the Internet. Then they shit on it and offered up the App Store protection racket as salvation.
It's only one of several themes where the giants of today crush the little guy. Computing is less free today than it was a decade ago.
Before Apple I had reach and distribution. Now I have less than 50% of that. And I don't have liberty and control over my own narrative anymore.
3 years ago in Quotes
the web dies one corporate whimper and one consumer shrug at a time
In order to refocus the Firefox organization on core browser growth through differentiated userexperiences, we are reducing investment in some areas such as developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development
3 years ago in Quotes
I don't think the user population is aware how disingenuous all of this tech crap is. It could be so awesome, and they don't even understand what's not awesome about it. It hurts in a deep, emotional space.
I have found so much inspiration in some of the great programmers of two generations ago. The writings of Chuck Moore and Alan Kay convince me that we somehow took two orders of magnitude of backwards steps in creating the present milieu of dysfunctional technology.
The worst part, IMO, is that it's all opaque. I don't control the device that I hold in my hand. I can't fix it because Google or Apple don't want me to. It is a tool of economic and social control, not a powerful technology that I can wield.
3 years ago in Quotes
.. we're just writing too much code. Companies have hundreds of millions of lines of code in production right now and nobody who knows how it works, and what we're doing is a kind of runaway train where we're just hiring more and more people to write more and more code, and trying to ramp education up to be able to produce more and more people, and - I can only say this from the sidelines, as I don't have a degree - we seem to, at least as per these individuals, be cheapening computer science at the (possibly indirect) behest of these businesses who aren't willing or able to step back and try things differently.