• 0 Posts
  • 190 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 4th, 2023

help-circle


  • Honestly, this isn’t much of a hypothetical for me. At work, my choices are Windows, Mac, or Ubuntu. I’m quite happy with Ubuntu, though I’ve switched away from the default desktop environment to i3.

    I use Arch (BTW) on my personal systems. And Ubuntu isn’t as bad as I worried it would be.

    My main gripe is snaps. Firefox is practically unusable as a snap. And my employer forbids installing any software (save for a select list of exceptions) not via the officially-supported Ubuntu way of doing things. Chrome is available without snap, so I use it on my work machine. Which annoys me, but if I’m less efficient in my job as a result, it’s their own fault.



  • I was really excited for CJDNS (not to be confused with “Domain Name System”) at one time. It’s a mesh networking protocol. And they’d established an “Internet 2” (as in, a sequel to “The Internet”) based on the CJDNS protocol called “Hyperborea.”

    I haven’t heard anything about CJDNS in a good while now. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other efforts looking to do something roughly the same, but I’m not up to date on anything more recent.




  • I kindof hate the slogan “they go low, we go high” (from Hillary’s campaign.)

    But this is an example of the “good” side of that slogan. The political left(-of-what-passes-for-center-in-the-U.S.-now-a-days) isn’t given to publicly calling for assassinations of the opposition party. It’s not even given (and, yes, there are exceptions) to calling privately for assassinations of the opposition. And that’s a good thing.

    It means the left(-of-U.S.-center) hasn’t turned into the fascist-dictatorship-trying-to-happen that the right has. It’s not the left(-of-U.S.-center) calling for civil war and pandering to creeps who chant “blood and soil” while carrying tiki torches around the capital.

    The day left(-of-U.S.-center) news sources delight in assassinations even of opposition as dangerously unhinged and power hungry as Trump because that sentiment started with snide remarks like yours is the day we have to worry that maybe the Democrats are sliding into their own brand of fascism.

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m for radical support of LGBT rights, womens’ autonomy in matters of personal health, universal free healthcare, and most other “liberal” causes. (I also identify as well left and libertarian-ward of the Democratic party and would love to see “to each according to need” be our modus operandi. I’m also for direct action.) I don’t fault the Democrats for being “too radical” by a long shot. (More likely, the Democrats will continue to be far too willing to let the Republicans control the narrative and cheat their way to political power. And that’s the bad side of “they go low, we go high”) And I don’t believe it’s very likely that the Democrats will slide into widespread advocacy for political violence like the Republicans have much more so already.

    But taking delight in assassination attempts and wishing they’d been successful – even those directed at Cheeto-flavored Hitler himself – isn’t helpful.

    All that said, I get it. I’m pissed at the U.S.'s descent toward fascism, too. But wishing him assassinated isn’t going to change anything for the better.



  • No joke. I’m ashamed to say I have had to endure Weblogic in the past. God was that time a massive clusterfuck.

    The company I worked for decided to use two particular separate products (frameworks, specifically; ATG and Endeca, even more specifically) to use in tandem in a rewrite of the company’s main e-commerce application. Between when we signed on the dotted line and when we actually started implementing things, Oracle acquired the companies behind both products in question.

    The company should have cut their losses, run away screaming, and started evaluating other options. That’s not what happened. Instead, they doubed-down and also adopted several other Oracle products (Weblogic and Oracle Linux on (shudder) Exalogic servers) because that’s, of course, what Oracle recommended to use with the two products in question. The company also contracted with Oracle-licensed “service integration” companies that made everything somehow even worse.

    And the e-commerce site rewrite absolutely crashed and burned in the most gloriously painful way possible. They ended up throwing away tens of millions of dollars and multiple years on it.

    When the e-commerce site rewrite did happen, it was many years later and used basically only FOSS technologies. I guess at least they learned their lesson. Until the upper management turns over again.








  • AI is quite fit for the task of understanding what might be the purpose of code

    Disagree.

    I don’t know how some non-AI tool could be better for such task.

    ClamAV has been filling a somewhat similar use case for a long time, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call it “AI”.

    I guess bayesian filters like email providers use to filter spam could be considered “AI” (though old-school AI, not the kind of stuff that’s such a bubble now) and may possibly be applicable to your use case.




  • I’m just speaking from their history. Like when they embraced Java, built their own JVM, shipped it with Windows, and then forked the Java language by adding Windows-specific APIs to Microsoft Java and not adding the Java 1.2 features to Microsoft Java. You can’t convince me their aim all along wasn’t specifically to kill Java, and cross-platform technologies like it. The whole “Windows tax” thing is another good example. And “Open Core.”

    And, who knows. Maybe they’re either nicer now or less competent at that kind of evil. But if so, that’s a relatively new thing. Their history as a company is full of (not-so-)“secretly planning to control the world”. And they have never really faced any consequences for their anti-trust violations. And if they didn’t want people to hold grudges, maybe they should have thought of that before fucking everyone over as thoroughly as they possibly could.

    I guess you could say Microsoft was perfecting the art of enshittification before it became such a pervasive thing. Plus, I largely blame Gates personally for the rise of the institution of proprietary software, which is also complete BS.

    Mind you, I don’t blame you for working for Microsoft or anything. No ethical consumption (or employment) under capitalism and all that. And it’s not like I’m not doing evil things on a regular basis as an employee where I work.