Speaking as a software developer, software developers should stick to their lane. There is plenty of stuff the very best software developers are stereotypically terrible at. “Programmer art” is a genuine phenomenon illustrating our lazy, half-baked efforts to create things that we are not expert at. Apparently, “Programmer politics” is another such area of non-expertise, because the tech bros ideas are a fucking stupid fantasy.
At least until they sneak it into VS Code’s telemetry. …only sort of joking.
Nextcloud file sync is a convenient centralized solution but it’s not designed for performance. Nothing about Nextcloud is designed for performance. It’s an “everything and the kitchen sink” multi-user cloud solution. That is nice for a lot of reasons. Nextcloud Sync is essentially a drop-in replacement for Google Drive or OneDrive or Dropbox that multiple people can use and that’s awesome. It works the same way as those tools, which is a blessing and a curse.
Nextcloud is for the same role you SAY you want, “All I want is a simple file sync setup like onedrive but without the microsoft.” That’s what it is. But I don’t think it’s what you’re actually asking for, and it’s not supposed to be. It has its role, and it’s good at that role. But I don’t think you actually want what you say you want, because in the details you’re describing something totally different.
If you want performance sync for just files, SyncThing is made for this. It has better conflict resolution. It has better decentralized connectivity, it doesn’t need the public IP server. It uses a very different approach to configuration. Its configuration is front-loaded, it takes a fair bit of work to get things talking to each other. It’s not suitable for the same things Nextcloud Sync is. But once you have it set up it’s rock solid reliable and blazing fast.
Personally I use both SyncThing and NextCloud Sync. I use them for different purposes, in different situations. NextCloud Sync takes care of my Windows documents and pictures, I use it to share photos with my family. I use it to sync one of the factors for my password vault. It works fine for this.
I also use SyncThing for large data sets that require higher performance. I have almost 400 GB of shared program data, (and game data/saved games), some of which I sync with SyncThing to multiple workstations in different parts of the country. It can deal with complex simultaneous usage that sometimes causes conflicts. It supports fine tuning sync strategies and files to ignore using configuration dotfiles. It’s a great tool. I couldn’t live without it. But I use both. They both have their place.
Nah, set it to broil for optimal results /s
Both the tool and the craftsman are to blame if you intend to use duct tape to build a house. The appropriate and acceptable uses of AI chatbots are similarly limited.
Android: It’s based on Linux, except it replaces any and all of the things that make Linux worth using, with Google, and runs it on hardware so proprietary, closed, encrypted and nefarious nothing the OS does can be plausibly trusted anyway.
AI is just a search engine you can talk to that summarizes everything it finds into a small nugget for you to consume, and in the process sometimes lies to you and makes up answers. I have no idea how people think it is an effective research tool. None of the “knowledge” it is sharing is actually created by it, it’s just automated plagiarism. We still need humans writing books (and websites) or the AI won’t know what to talk about.
Books are going to keep doing just fine.
Yeah that’s fair, but for some reason discussion of AI combined with Linda McMahon being the secretary of education robs me of any ability for intelligent thought and simply fills my head with thoughts of wrestling.
Don’t let A1 distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
At least 1% of the money being poured into “AI research” nowadays seems to be spent on spewing these breathless puff pieces everywhere. The other 99% is spent on datacenter costs, probably. I am so excited for the day this bubble will finally pop. Just imagine the firesales on GPUs and rack space. It’ll be glorious.
If we’re actually trying to achieve sustainability, we have to stop being consumers. “consume” means to use up and destroy leaving nothing useful behind. This is what consumers do. Think about this the next time someone says the “additional price is passed on to the consumer” and phrases like that. Want to stop paying those prices? Stop consuming!
Instead of sending your money to some evil dictatorship on the other side of the world to “consume” something else, we should be building a system and a society where we can give that money, probably a little more more money even, to somebody in your local community to do actual productive work that doesn’t destroy the environment.
Right to repair is a huge project that we need to force down the throats of the large corporations who want to keep us being consumers forever no matter how much it destroys the planet. But India can still do things like this even without having the “right” to repair, they just figure out a solution and do it anyway, and we can too if we learn from them. We throw away so much perfectly useful stuff. Not just electronics but everything in our modern world from clothes to cars, because economics has told us that it’s expensive to repair or repurpose or salvage, and cheaper to buy a new one, buy more, buy in bulk, buy and dispose. And it often is, but that’s false economics. It’s the economics of throwing more shit in landfill and digging up more tons of rock and burning coal to turn it into something new. It’s the economics with all the costs externalized onto the environment and onto the future. It’s the economics of us destroying ourselves.
Ugh, don’t give him any more reasons to attack Canada please.
Nextcloud Notes or Joplin (nevermind all the other features Nextcloud provides) tick most of your boxes. They’re more productivity focused than privacy focused, it doesn’t do “zero knowledge” encryption the way you’re describing, but I don’t really understand the point of that when you’re self-hosting and the server host belongs to you anyway. The federation may leave you wanting more and the collaboration might not be “real time” enough for you either, though. If you can build something better by all means go for it.
When it comes to TikTok it is less clear to me what a good decision would be
the fact a foreign and potentially hostile state can influence the people is a serious threat.
That seems pretty clear to me.
fail2ban is mandatory equipment for any ssh server accessible to the public especially on its default port. It’s highly configurable, but the default settings will do fine at making it statistically impossible for any user or password to be brute forced.
Yeah when I first started there was one guy whose code reviews I dreaded, he would nitpick every detail and he would stand by it, he would tell me to do it a completely different way that was 10x more work. It felt like I would never get my stories done because I had drawn “that asshole” in the code review lottery.
Years later, I came to realize that he was actually the best, he taught me so much about the way I should be thinking of things and structuring things, that have saved so much time and trouble later on, I now specifically reach out to him for a review when I am trying to do something complex because I know he’s going to give me an honest, thorough and useful review. Nobody’s doing anyone any favours in the long run by rubber stamping things, it may help you keep your sprint velocity up, but it’s not going to result in high quality code, and the bad quality code will inevitably bite you.
I actually dare them to try. I’m really looking forward to the massive paychecks I’m going to get when companies are panicking to try to untangle all the absolute nonsense bullshit these AI companies are about to unleash into corporate codebases. The AI-slop bugfest will make the Y2K issue seem trivial. I’m so excited, the future looks very bright for human software developers.
My advice: Practice going over other people’s code with a fine-tooth comb looking for bad architecture, flaws and inefficiencies. You won’t always be right, you won’t find them all, but you’ll learn lots of skills you’ll need in the future. Whatever you do, don’t undersell yourselves, remember that your experience is valuable, and AI has no experience, it just has a huge library it can shotgun “solutions” out of. Half the time they don’t even compile, nevermind work properly, or efficiently.
I feel like 99% of the time that’s just a lazy or misleading excuse. I’ve worked in proprietary software development for 25 years and I’ve never worked for a company that didn’t avoid restricted third-party code like the plague at all times. In the few, rare cases when we did have to use some proprietary third-party licensed library, it was usually kept very compartmentalized and easy to drop out of the code specifically because we were always afraid the other proprietary code vendor could fuck us and jack up their prices or find some nasty way to make our lives difficult.
The excuse that there is some secret but legitimate third-party code they’re not allowed to share simply doesn’t hold water in the vast majority of cases.
More likely answers are that some beancounter somewhere still imagines that the proprietary source code could possibly be valuable in some hypothetical future acquisition (nonsense of course) even though it has no real commercial value, or fears that it could expose the company to liability if some security flaw or licensing violation is found (more plausible).
Ironically, perhaps the most likely reality for this resistance is that the software actually includes code that dictates they were actually always obligated to publish the source but never did. ie, GPL-based code. GPL violations are all too common in proprietary software and very few organizations have codebase governance effective enough to keep the situation under control with developers copy-pasting from anything they can find on Google. Releasing their plagiarized GPL source code would reveal to the world that they were not in compliance all along. Let it quietly die, and nobody ever finds out and they get away with it. It’s not simply that they’re embarrassed by bad code, it’s that their bad code will potentially incriminate them. Not worth the risk, and sometimes it’s not just a risk it’s a certainty.
The proprietary software industry relies on open source so much and rarely gives much of anything back. I’m fortunate that the company I’m working for now actually takes licensing seriously and does contribute to open source projects to some degree, although I keep insisting they need to do better.
They may seem like nerf when they first come out of the AI, but they turn into real bullets once they start filling people’s heads with convincing enough lies and falsehoods, and those people start wielding their own weapons against minorities, democracy, and the government. If the election of Trump 2.0 has not convinced you of the immense danger of disinformation and misinformation, I have literally no idea how anything could ever possibly get through to you.
I have been constantly asking myself why there isn’t something like this, and just wondering if maybe I was missing something about the seeming immense complexity of doing this on a small scale.
Now there is something like this.
I don’t love PHP, but I also don’t love having dozens of separate passwords, keys, certificates and other nonsense to keep track of like I’m doing now. I don’t mind using PHP to get around that if I can.