Using different apps for password management and for 2fa is good for your security and good for redundancy. If your vault is compromised, you don’t want your OTP info compromised with it. I personally use Aegis.

That said, Aegis is still an Android app and while I have a backup of it’s data, I think I’m still out of luck if my phone breaks until it gets repaired or replaced. I’ve been trying to figure that one out, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of good options with desktop support.

This has happened before. GUI tools were going to mean less developers with less cost, but it didn’t materialize. Higher level languages were going to cause mass layoffs but it didn’t really materialize. Tools like WordPress were going to put web developers out of business, but it didn’t really. Sitebuilders like Wix were going to do it, too, but they really haven’t.

These tools perform well at the starter end, but terribly at the larger or enterprise end. Current AI is like that. It can help better than I think people on here give it credit for, but it can’t replace. At best, it simply produces things with bugs, or that doesn’t quite work. At worst, it appears to work but is riddled with problems.

I genuinely believe AI isn’t over hyped in the long run. We’re going to need solutions to fix our current way of work. But I feel confident it’s still further away than the people investing in it think it is, and they’re going to be paying big for that mistake.

You are correct that a reboot will trigger a full rescan. I’m always on the lookout for better sync. I just don’t think it’s out there right now for easy bidirectional sync.

Basically, if you want to set and forget, Syncthing is the best option. If you want more control, you’ll need to look into setting up rsync scripts or similar, which will at least better let you control how often to sync.

They should flash when they are first turned on, so you can tell that they turned on. That helps diagnose connection issues versus power issues. After that, though, darkness please.

I like async but dislike await. I spend entirely too much time on everything I build trying to maximize how much I can do in parallel because I find it tremendously satisfying.

Nah, this one has a margin of error. It’s just that “take down a large percentage of all computers in the world simultaneously” is quite a bit outside of that margin for a security software.

Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.

The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.

Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in “zero-tolerance” policies that do things like punish the victim because they were “involved” in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.

To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is “phones may not interrupt class.” Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what’s happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they’ve already completed their work, and that’s acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they’re supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn’t get in trouble. The parent will hear, “Brayden was using his phone and he didn’t get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me.”

If you’ve talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They’ll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher’s discretion versus an outright ban.

tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.

On the plus side for them, they can probably use Gemini to write their apology blog about how they missed the mark with that ad.

It is legitimately useful for getting started with using a new programming library or tool. Documentation is not always easy to understand or easy to search, so having an LLM generate a baseline (even if it’s got mistakes) or answer a few questions can save a lot of time.

Just an American browsing c/all here. We have 30 and 40 year mortgages and no one can afford a house. I wish Canada the best of luck with it, though.

Video games. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some great games, but the entire experience has degraded on average.

• The inclusion of obnoxiously long, often unskippable, intro sequences with studio credits and such. There used to be maybe a logo, maybe a very short sequence at worst, and almost always skippable.
• Most of the big budget games are intended to be a grindy slog, often to get you to spend more money on micro transactions. Fun takes a back seat to intentionally addictive but objectively less enjoyable experiences.
• Others are intended to be cinematic experience. Some of that can be fun, but sometimes I just want something like the old Sonic or Mario games that I can just pick up, play for a bit, and put down.
• Enjoy a game? You could talk to friends about it at school, or buy a magazine that talks about it. The experience now is largely an unregulated online wasteland… If you find a community, it may quickly be beset by people that you really don’t want to associate with, posting crap that no magazine ever would have published. Except for some of the funnier magazines, which may have published it just to rightfully mock the person.

The graphics have improved. In some cases the gameplay has improved. I don’t want to downplay those. I’m just annoyed with how the overall experience has gotten worse on average.

Why pre-wipe? This feels like washing your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

Generally when people bring up some personal detail, my immediate reaction is to assume the opposite. Especially if it begins with “as a.” For example: “as a woman,” this person is a man. “As a black person,” this is the whitest person you will ever meet. “As a 60 year old,” definitely ten.

In theory I guess it provides better security in some ways, but certainly not all over giving you hardware and a VPN. So there’s that. But yeah, it sucks.

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an ad from the OS on Android. I know some manufacturers, Samsung in particular, include ads but that’s not “Android” so much as “Samsung’s shitty skin of Android.”

The closest I’ve gotten to an ad on Pixel is a thing to review new features after updates.

It’s the downside of open source: You’re at the mercy of companies that don’t care and developers who are primarily interested in the hardware they’re using rather than the hardware you’re using.

The best experience is going to be hardware that’s built and certified for Linux. System76, Tuxedo, a bunch of other smaller names and the rare Dell or Lenovo. But that’s definitely not practical for everyone, or a good idea to convince people to buy new hardware for Linux.

It’ll be a slow transition. The more enthusiasts hop on the bandwagon, the more manufacturers and hardware vendors will care about support. The more Microsoft keeps irritating their customers, the more companies will move away. The support will come, it’s been improving for a long time.

All that said. I’d recommend CachyOS or PopOS if you get the urge to try again. I’ve tried a bunch of distributions and those seem to have the best focus on “just make consumer hardware work right out of the box.” That’s no guarantee of course, but it’s a start.

I think the problem is that search does not make money. Ads make money, and subscriptions make money. Convincing people to switch from Google ads to New Google ads would involve dumping tons of money into becoming popular enough to attract advertisers. Convincing people to pay for search, like Kagi is doing, is probably even harder.

To be fair, I bet some percentage of those that don’t use an ad blocker ARE using something like no script and just don’t need one as a result.

There’s some inherent risk in the ad blocker as well, though. If it’s an extension, you’re trusting that this thing you installed, that can read and modify every website you visit, isn’t going to do anything sneaky. Yes, maybe it’s open source, but every once in a while something sneaks into open source projects, too. It will get caught, but it could be after the damage is done.

I mean, I use an ad blocker. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to value security and not use one.