• 12 Posts
  • 130 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • so you mean unauthorized apps wont be running on android?

    That is indeed the plan and what is meant by “starts restricting FOSS apps” (which is an incorrect statement but whatever)

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-sideloading-of-unverified-android-apps-starting-next-year/

    However, making that happen outside of its app store will require Google to take a page from Apple’s playbook and flex its muscle in a way many Android users and developers could find intrusive. Google plans to create a streamlined Android Developer Console, which devs will use if they plan to distribute apps outside of the Play Store. After verifying their identities, developers will have to register the package name and signing keys of their apps. Google won’t check the content or functionality of the apps, though.

    (…)

    Google says that only apps with verified identities will be installable on certified Android devices, which is virtually every Android-based device

    What was argued was that people can basically just compile/download and deploy their own apps via development tools. Which is unfeasible for the vast majority of users for skill reasons but also, as I said, likely to be blocked by google themselves in the not too distant future.



  • Is this manageable for the non-dev by chance?

    Not really.

    I’ve not been following things super closely, but the idea would be that each user would get their own developer key and then locally compile and deploy whatever apps they want as though it were a project they themselves were working on. The first bit is not too dissimilar from how a lot of people with XBOXes made dev accounts to install emulators. But the latter is going to get real messy and REAL compromised REAL fast as people just use third party tools and binaries that will inevitably be compromised.

    I’m feeling a dumbphone alt may be the only viable path

    It really depends on what your use case is. If you actually just talk to people on phones? Uhm… I am not even sure where you would find a dumb phone at this point, but that will probably work for voice calls and SMS using just your carrier and MAYBE wifi. But anything that involves apps, which is a shockingly large part of the world, will be a mess. Some you can (and should) do workarounds (banking apps, for example) but others you are kind of up a creek since your options are to use a modern phone or not be able to (for example) see your kid’s daycare schedule.






  • Yeah. There are a few useful websites I end up at that serve similar purposes.

    My usual workflow is that I need to be able to work in an airgapped environment where it is a lot easier to get “my dotfiles” approved than to ask for utility packages like that. Especially since there will inevitably be some jackass who says “You don’t know how to work without google? What are we paying you for?” because they mostly do the same task every day of their life.

    And I do find that writing the cheat sheet myself goes a long way towards me actually learning them so I don’t always need it. But I know that is very much how my brain works (I write probably hundreds of pages of notes a year… I look at maybe two pages a year).


  • One trick that one of my students taught me a decade or so ago is to actually make an alias to list the useful flags.

    Yes, a lot of us think we are smart and set up aliases/functions and have a huge list of them that we never remember or, even worse, ONLY remember. What I noticed her doing was having something like goodman-rsync that would just echo out a list of the most useful flags and what they actually do.

    So nine times out of 10 I just want rsync -azvh --progress ${SRC} ${DEST} but when I am doing something funky and am thinking “I vaguely recall how to do this”? dumbman rsync and I get a quick cheat sheet of what flags I have found REALLY useful in the past or even just explaining what azvh actually does without grepping past all the crap I don’t care about in the man page. And I just keep that in the repo of dotfiles I copy to machines I work on regularly.


  • I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution. But it is one of the best transfer/archiving solutions.

    Yes, it is INCREDIBLY powerful and is often 90% of what people actually want/need. But to be an actual backup solution you still need infrastructure around that. Bare minimum is a crontab. But if you are actually backing something up (not just copying it to a local directory) then you need some logging/retry logic on top of that.

    At which point you are building your own borg, as it were. Which, to be clear, is a great thing to do. But… backups are incredibly important and it is very much important to understand what a backup actually needs to be.


  • It is obviously based on an outdated concept of gender, but it actually is pretty useful to help match people to passports. If someone identifies as male but is dressed like a woman, it raises red flags. The answer to that might be as simple as “This is a 90s sitcom and I lost a transphobic bet” but it is there. Same with hair color.

    Which, funny enough, is an argument for people to actually write down the gender they identify as. But it is also a lot like hair color or facial hair in that it is just too cost and time prohibitive to update a passport every time someone tries a new look. Because… genderfluid people exist.



  • Its not burying your head in the sand.

    If it is isolated or people just don’t care? Then… it kind of doesn’t actually matter. You scan the forums and optimally have community managers/PR people to do the same to keep an eye out for “This was weird?” style comments but you mostly focus on the stuff that naturally rises to the top or that you identify as an issue.

    The more bug reports you have? That is engineer time spent assessing what is and isn’t a priority. And the sad reality is that it is a LOT easier to say “we have our five thousandth number one priority” rather than to say something doesn’t matter. Because if stuff does go down? Suddenly you are on record saying the most important thing ever (whether it is a critical vulnerability or just something people fixate on) didn’t matter and you can bet everyone will throw you under the bus.

    As a developer? I want every bug reported to me because I genuinely do want to make the best product I can. That said… if you don’t care enough about reporting a bug or it isn’t reproducible enough to matter… I am not going to complain about getting some extra time to work on things that actually interest me. Which may very well be trying to reproduce that “weird behavior” myself because it sounds like it could be bad.

    And… as someone managing a project/team of developers? I can watch in real time as people become more and more drained as every single day is fixing all the “this would be low impact if we were allowed to call it low impact” bugs. And that person who clearly was bored and searching for the corneriest of corner cases (the bug that “nobody knows about”)… that causes significant psychic damage to the person who reads the report and has to fix it.


  • … sort of.

    The old model was definitely hell and there is a reason basically no studios supported Linux builds.

    These days? Yes, you can go a long way with targeting the SLR. A buddy who does game dev for his day job describes it as “targeting 3/4 of a platform” or being like targeting two generations of the same console. In theory, your middleware handles everything. In practice, you have another platform for your testers to evaluate RCs on and you still find weird corner case weirdness.

    But the issue is also… that lets you target the Steam Linux Runtime. What about other storefronts? And the people who tend to care the most about actually making Linux builds are the same ones who aren’t fully comfortable with the idea that “SteamOS == Linux” as it were.

    So it becomes that discussion of whether the added testing and development burden is actually worth… still not actually being all that great ideologically.


  • Wrong. Bugs exist whenever you know about them, or not.

    In a perfect world? I fully agree.

    In a world where I am limited by hours in a day and how many engineers I have on staff? A bug that nobody knows about is not a bug. That is obviously playing with fire because there is a big difference between “if you unequip and reequip a flashlight over and over it will make you invisible” and “if you mash these four numbers at once then the ATM will wipe its cameras and start spewing benjies”. But for the purposes of adding new features/maintaining developer sanity? Yeah…

    I dunno. This comes up a lot. I am going to ignore the circle jerk of “linux users are smarter and make better bug reports and also have bigger dicks” because… either people are slipping their hands down their pants or they know that is nonsense.

    But I think it DOES ignore the reality that adding actual support for a new platform does drastically increase the testing and build/deployment overheads which are usually the realest of costs anyway. And… truth be told, I think the standard of “Don’t break Proton support. Fix things as they come up” really is the best of both worlds.


  • Russia is already using conscription in the war

    https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/02/europe/putin-russia-spring-conscription-ukraine-intl

    The main distinction is that there are laws (ha!) against sending improperly trained conscripts into “active combat”. And while that can be potentially accelerated by claiming it is an emergency, it is much easier to just change the definition of “proper training”… which they already (allegedly) are.

    But also? Russia already has massive morale and corruption issues. Giving even more untrained men guns is just a good way to have more mutinies and to have even more military gear show up on ebay/temu.

    And also? Even if they triple the boots in Ukraine, having a second front (or one really giant front if it is all of NATO…) is not at all a worthy trade. Especially when those are fresh militaries with all the gear they had been holding back from Ukraine in case of this very scenario.

    Nah. This is most likely the normal probing that putin does as standard practice with the added goal of scaring the EU into not wanting to support Ukraine in case Russia retaliates. Zelenskyy is just spinning this as the kind of bogeyman that would get his people much needed support.





  • Homie? I want you to know that while I am going to be inflammatory, I am not insulting you. In a slightly sane world, that should be fine.

    NEVER work with children. “Hey kids. You can go home or you can stay with me and a few others and learn how to use a computer!”. At best you are setting yourself up for some awkward phone calls when Little Jimmy gets caught looking at something his parents don’t approve of.

    If you are a close family friend and the parents understand what you are going to be teaching their kid (and obviously want you to teach it), go for it. If you are just watching them while they eat orange slices? Don’t fucking go anywhere near that. Let the teachers who actually train in how to handle these situations do it.

    And the other aspect: Kids (and most adults) are not rational or intelligent. They aren’t going to take “Hey, if Susie sends you nudes don’t put them on this server because it will get me sent to prison as a diddler” as education on why they should not fucking do that.


    If you ever want to get scared straight as it were? Take a teacher out for drinks (and you better pay for them!). You’ll hear LOTS of horror stories and get even a glimpse into the kind of hell they have to put up with.

    The show Black-ish (like a lot of Kenya Barris’s work) has a LOT of problems. But the number of times teacher friends have shared https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jqmj0ILwfM. And it is not at all exclusive to black people (or even men).