I don't know if the author will see this or not. The RF shielding probably didn't get wet. It just looks like that. I have a TI-83 Plus Silver Edition which sports a semi-transparent case. I'm the original owner. I never got a drop of liquid on it. And the RF shield in mine looks exactly like yours. It has since the day I bought it.
Sometimes I wonder if the long interview process isn't a psychological game. Maybe they think they can leverage sunk cost fallacy against you just so they can low-ball you. Yeah, the pay might not be great, but if you walk away now, you'll have wasted 9 weeks of effort! You can't give up now. You're invested. ;-)
I've recently started using devcontainers for some of my projects. VSCode makes using them pretty seamless and convenient. I'd be shocked if Codespaces on Github didn't have first class support for devcontainers by the time it becomes available for individual users. It seems like a logical extention of their utility.
This company doesn't understand public relations. Rather than countering bad PR with good PR, they decided to double down, cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Except that there will be no price to be paid for this (because no one will ever hear about it, and they sell toys), and the people who will remember it are their employees, who will be effectively intimidated from commenting on their experiences at the company after they leave.
The Streisand Effect is starting to function like the Law of Averages in some people's minds. There is no publicity fairy flying around to right all wrongs. Publicizing things is extremely hard if they don't go viral, and they only go viral if they are funny, cute, bizarre, or incredibly cruel.
You vastly overestimate how much PR matters. There's no shortage of companies and politicians with absolute dog water public images, that are still wildly profitable/constantly get re-elected.
Lots of companies are run by bad people who should never run companies. Sometimes you don't know they're bad until they completely fail to handle adversity properly.
A company I once worked for was violating several state laws. When I brought it to the owner's attention, he threatened to sue me. When I reported it to the state†, he fired me and said he was going to send his lawyers after me.
They never got the chance. The state shut him down a few weeks later.
†Note: When you report something to the state, in some states, you have no right to privacy. Not every state has whistleblower protections. This was explained to me by the state liaison I spoke with. He said under state law, he had to tell the employer who filed the complaint.
I'm so tired of this argument. I want to host stuff myself. Really, I do. But I really don't have enough time in the day to do it.
I set up a blog this weekend using Hugo, Ansible, and Github Actions to host it on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. It "only" took two days, but I'm exhausted and I don't actually have any content yet.
I host Plex and TiddlyWiki at home on my Raspberry Pi. I used docker and traefik. Sometimes it still has weird issues and I have to reboot it. It was another project that "only" took a weekend and left me exhausted.
So let's say I don't want to self host, but I don't want to use Github. What are my options? I used to use Bitbucket, but I moved to Github a few years ago to consolidate my accounts. I liked Bitbucket, but people give you weird looks when you give them a Bitbucket URL. It's not as seamlessly supported in apps that can automatically understand Github urls. Confluence kept buying other products and tacking them on. And they kept trying to upsell me.
Then there's Gitlab. I'm going to have to get used to it because my employer is transitioning to it, away from Github. This article mentions developers having short memories. I remember when Gitlab decidedly said they'll do business with anyone back when people were shaming tech companies for helping and cooperating with ICE a few years ago. That left a bad taste in my mouth.
There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him.
I can't help but feel like Github is probably the lesser evil here. Honestly, I'd pay for a service if I believed in it. It's important to me that I'm the customer, not the product. That's why I switched from Gmail to ProtonMail a few years ago. I have their top tier paid account because I believe in them and I want to get what I pay for.
Sorry, I don't really have a point. I'm just tired of this argument. I'd self host in a second if I could do it quickly, easily, and reliably. But I don't think I can.
Well it's a tradeoff right? Zero hassle, zero control. Lots of hassle, lots of control.
Part of the complexity is that the effects aren't all immediate, and humans aren't good at thinking long term. People put code on GH for years and then Microsoft took it and undermined those same developers. So it might seem like zero hassle right now, but it's probably big destruction later on.
Personally I'm growing an allergy to these kinds of "no catch, we promise" services. What they usually mean is "we sell your data to other marketers, governments, and potential bad actors", "we try to hypnotize you with ads", "we aren't actually giving you this thing and we'll delist it whenever we want", or worse.
I know this doesn't respond to your issue, my weak effort there is that are a fair number of hosts for things like nextcloud and gitlab. My brother runs a substantial suite of services all through Docker and admins it almost not at all. This stuff is possible, but I agree it's harder than signing into GH with SSO and pushing code. All I'm saying is that there are other costs, you just don't pay until way later.
That's very true. I just wish there was a middle ground. I'd pay for a service that just runs a managed version of Gitea. Something similar to installing WordPress or a PHP bulletin board system to an old-fashioned web host. Hell, I could probably do just that if there was a super low end version of these types of services that will run with just PHP and Apache.
EDIT: Oh my god. I think I understand Sqlite and Fossil a little better now.
Codeberg is just Gitea hosted in Germany: their Impressum lists the legal address as "Codeberg e.V. Gormannstraße 14 10119 Berlin".
Which may be good because EU privacy protection laws are stronger than US's. German laws specifically can be restrictive in other aspects though; e.g. there's no concept of protected free speech.
> I remember when Gitlab decidedly said they'll do business with anyone back when people were shaming tech companies for helping and cooperating with ICE a few years ago. That left a bad taste in my mouth.
I could see how this would leave a bad taste in your mouth, but I'm not sure it follows that Github is the lesser evil.
I can't think of specific examples (aside from the EEE philosophy brought up in the post and copilot if you consider that to be a Bad Thing), but Microsoft seems to have done plenty of Bad Stuff in the past. Maybe a comparable amount, if not more, Bad Stuff than GitLab?
That's true. But I use VSCode every day. FWIW, I tried the de-Microsofted version and it worked well for almost a year. But then the plugin store split happened and it just made life more difficult than sucking it up and going back to vanilla VSCode. So I'd be a huge hypocrite if I said Github is a step too far.
Self-hosting should become absurdly easy to become widely popular, and to become any popular around non-technical users.
Very easy Linux host setup (like that of AWS, Linode, DO, etc) + containers (podman or docker) or stuff like flatpack or appimage should solve most of that problem. What's missing form the picture is an easy (I mean laughably easy) way to connect services. Something like a patch panel should be created to control UFW / traefik / whatever, when apps don't snap together automatically.
> There's Sourcehut. But I have friends with beef with the guy who made it and I don't want to support him.
What's their beef if you don't mind me asking? Drew seems like a nice enough guy. He is very opinionated obviously, but he's created many amazing FOSS projects.
I don’t know the OP’s friends’ beef with Drew, and I don’t have a direct beef with Drew, but I cancelled my paid Sourcehut account after getting a clear message that Drew wasn’t interested in supporting anyone who wants to use the software he writes on non-FOSS systems.
It’s a stricter stance than the FSF, and I won’t support the FSF financially (as I fundamentally do not agree with their mission, their licence, or their leadership). So…Sourcehut gets a year of paid support from me, but that’s it. It fundamentally doesn’t interest me, because I’m not interested in using Linux or FreeBSD as a daily driver.
He might have opinions about his software, but he also made it clear that Source Hut is free from his views, and he sees sr.ht as a serious business.
So, I don't see Drew's views as a reason to not to support Source Hut, because in my perspective while he might not be agreeing with one's view, he's actively protecting these views to allow them to be expressed, and this is great in my view. The relevant comment about this, made by himself is here [0].
>But I really don't have enough time in the day to do it.
Things that take time cost money, because time is valuable. You can pay in money to self-host, or you can pay in time, or you can pay in privacy and marketing, but you can't just get it for free.
I'm sure the tools are out there. But I'm at a point where I have more money than time for this. I empathize with the self-hosting ethos. I want a more decentralized internet. But I don't enjoy the setup and maintenance. I have previous little free time. I even spend much of it writing software, because I enjoy that. I don't enjoy being a sysadmim or my own personal devops.
I think I realized that in college when a friend tried to get me to run Gentoo as my first linux distro. I never made it to a desktop! I still run linux as my daily driver today, but I'm currently using Pop!_OS after having used Ubuntu since college. Because when I'm using my daily driver computer, I want to use it, not maintain it.
> But I'm at a point where I have more money than time for this.
Sorry I'm not trying to stalk you across multiple threads, but this made me wonder if there's a market for contract SREs. Like you own a car but you take it for oil changes and tune-ups, you own a server but some admins SSH into it here and there when it needs fixing (puts an emphasis on encryption, maybe). I think it hasn't happened because there's not a huge difference between this and purchasing hosted services, but, maybe it's an interesting slightly different option.
a competitive engineering group I worked for ten+ years ago definitely had this exactly. Except "ssh from outside" was also carefully monitored, and the primary admin visited a few times a month in person. That computer admin was not the boss, it is a secure environment with a lot of top-down control. Engineers were occasionally terminated, while the executives rarely were. Its a real thing in the city.
I think we need to separate IRC the client from IRC the protocol. Everything you just described is possible with a sufficiently advanced client without any changes to the protocol. In fact, some clients already do what you describe.
"A client could do that" is true. It's also unhelpful. They don't all, or even most, do that. Consistency is valuable, and trying to coach people to switch IRC clients (assuming one exists that ticks the right boxes on their platform) is, to me, a pretty poor use of my limited time on this planet.
I don't love Discord or Slack and there are a lot of things I miss about IRC, but the amount of sandpaper around getting people who are less than extremely forgiving of Computer Stuff to use it adroitly is one. Two chat platforms is already one too many for me, and IRC doesn't really make the cut for a third anymore because I too am becoming less forgiving of Computer Stuff as I get older, too.
> "A client could do that" is true. It's also unhelpful.
That's a fundamental disagreement. I know some people like tightly walled gardens where there can only be one client and you're stuck with its limitations. Personally, I despise those systems and will do everything to avoid them.
> Consistency is valuable
Consistency is not valuable in this context, it is a straightjacket. I want a client which works exactly the way I want, which is likely different from what you want. So we need probably different clients, or at least an extremely configurable one.
This is why email is so wonderful and I use it above all else. I can have my client which I love and others can have their clients which they love and I find unusable but we can all be happy.
I completely agree--it absolutely is a fundamental disagreement! It's also why "but why won't people use IRC?" is misguided. I won't use IRC because I don't value what it does anymore. I valued it a lot more when almost everyone I talked to was as much of a computer nerd as I am--that's no longer the case and the computer-nerdy parts of my life are complementary pieces rather than core ones now, so I want different things.
The idea that IRC might be better was why I clicked on this thread in the first place, before I really parsed the srht part of it, 'cause my values absolutely do not overlap with theirs. (Which is fine. Like what you like!)
Part of the problem is though that there people (like myself) that simply don't want any of those features. If everyone agreed that these features are worth having then there would be no problem, since then every client would get them eventually.
People have different needs and expectations, so why shouldn't different clients for different people exist?
TBH? Because the expectation for a communications platform is that you want people to communicate with you, and imposing the need to keep a set of caps in my head for your client is grating and annoying. "I only accept text-based email" would be the closest equivalent I can think of, and I don't think I'd go out of my way to write a text-based email to you because you choose not to parse `<ul>`.
I'm not saying somebody who only accepts text-based email is wrong, mind--do as thou wilt and all. I am saying that the more barriers you present to being communicated with, the less reasonable it is to expect people to communicate with you. IRC makes it too difficult to communicate in modes I've come to expect as normal, so I'm just not gonna do that these days.
What do you mean with keeping caps in your head for my client? Capabilities? Why would you need to keep those in mind?
One doesn't need to keep anything in mind if one just has two different clients for the two user groups. And there are IRC clients, such as thelounge or irccloud (ok.. more than just a client), that offer things like inline images/audio, link preview, etc. (and wouldn't be hard to add missing things there).
On the protocol level they just send urls in the irc messages, which falls back nicely for the other user group. I send images, pastes, etc. all the time on IRC it's just I don't want my client to render any of them inline - I want to decide if I look at something or not, while you want a client that does render everything inline for the most part.
PS: My spam filter judges html emails rather harshly :P
> What do you mean with keeping caps in your head for my client? Capabilities? Why would you need to keep those in mind?
Because the point of a conversation is to communicate. Your client is changing the meaning of what I am sending to you, and I have to know that to effectively communicate with you. I value clarity, and IRC doesn't offer me this without knowing what the other client is doing. I do not trust a normal, representative user to click on every relevant link and internalize it from there, because my experience is that people don't. On the other hand, being able to post a snippet makes it part of the conversation and not a reference, and in my experience means people are more likely to actually read the thing. The assumption that I should just throw URLs at you and you will parse them, either through a computer or mentally, and do the right thing with them increases the lossiness of communication, and adds to my mental stack. My mental stack is tall enough already for me.
In my experience from platform to platform it's a difference of kind, and frankly? It's also not one I really want to be dealing with myself on the sending end more generally. I don't like the bouncer paradigm and I'm not paying irccloud to host one for me when I can do so myself but doing so myself is annoying and work that other platforms do not demand of me. And I'm not going to a pastebin website when I can literally drag a code file in and click "post as snippet". It's slower and it's unpleasant. A sufficiently smart client could solve these things, sure--but Slack and Discord already do them, and the 99% case are there and not on IRC.
I am not, to be totally clear, saying you're wrong to like what you like. I've run IRC servers many times and I used them steadily for about fifteen years. But I have learned, personally and for me, that the things users seem to value on IRC makes those folks harder for me to communicate with as we've normed (for lack of a better term) rich experiences in group conversations. And if you're cool with that, that's totally fine. It's a tradeoff, not a moral thing. It does also means that (not that you're doing it, but some IRC defenders in this thread have definitely logged on) incredulity that Nobody Wants To Use IRC just isn't reasonable. It's not a friendly platform unless your values are its values. Mine aren't anymore, so I don't use it.
I don't think the argument that the mere existence of clients that work differently ruin the modern features somehow is really that fair (see below). The bouncer argument is kinda fair, but if you also don't like to live in a walled gardens (slack or discord), it limits the options a lot (although there are IRC servers that have integrated bouncers! Matrix is kinda like running your own bouncer again, unless you are ok with a third-party running it for you).
I can also accept that there are many more non-modern IRC clients than modern ones that work the way you would expect, so the overall expectation would be biased.
And that probably it was too little too late.
But I think you are overthinking it by a lot. If you were to use IRC, you should just use a modern "magical" IRC clients and not worry about what happens in the background (and btw it's not just "could" but "does".. there are clients that do all that already - where you can just drag and drop stuff in and it will magically do the right thing). And I am willing to bet that in other instances you already do operate that way. Unless your mail client is very broken it will send a plain text version of your email along with the html email. Do you worry there too that I am actually just looking at the plain text version of your email and not with the intended html formatting?
Or do you worry that the person you are talking to on slack might just be connected via matterircd via IRC (or directly via IRC back before slack did the bait 'n switch) and not see any of your snippets, images, etc.? Which btw. I am totally doing despite how much it butchers everything - I just cannot stand that UI (and neither can my rather old laptop).
> I don't think the argument that the mere existence of clients that work differently ruin the modern features somehow is really that fair (see below).
It totally does, though. If I write an emoji thumbsup, and the recipient only sees a tofu box, they won't know if I'm agreeing, disagreeing, or saying something else.
If I'm participating in a heterogeneous environment, I need to refrain from including any mission-critical information in a form that can't be read by all of the participants. And since writing the same information twice is usually too much work, the extended functionality winds up completely unused, or at least only gets used for low-value spam.
> Or do you worry that the person you are talking to on slack might just be connected via matterircd via IRC
Yes, I do worry about that. If I find out that one of my coworkers is using a Slack client that doesn't implement all the functionality in the reference client, and can't just talk them out of it, then I'll have to make sure not to use anything that they can't see.
I might even start doing an IRC bridge myself, in fact, since at that point there's really no actual purpose in running a chat client with a bunch of functionality that I cannot use.
A major part of Slack's value is that this is very rare. Almost everyone just uses the reference implementation.
This is even worse because you have no idea what other clients support. The best part of modern IM is that you know what you see is pretty much what they see. Tiny differences in presentation make a huge difference on the message.
