Polish scrabble’s worst nightmare

K-9 mail is literally Thunderbird. It’s been rebranded and taken over by Mozilla. They’re keeping the k-9 branding as its own (otherwise identical) app as a nostalgia token for the people that have used it for a long time.

Firefox automatically updates to install new privacy-abusing features like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112. So getting all the settings right once isn’t enough—you need to be constantly vigilant.

Like you said, a fork is a much better option, since they take care of stripping out the user-hostile nonsense for you. I like Librewolf.

I’m switching to Librewolf. I don’t want ads in my browser.

YouTube for Nazis

The color ones have lower resolution screens and less contrast+brightness than black and white. If you read comics it’s a big step up, but if you read mostly black and white text, it’s a downgrade.

Fastmail

I’m not sure of the specific case numbers but searching brings up many sources, e.g. https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/ (2006)

Matrix and XMPP don’t hide metadata (who you’re talking to, when, and how often). This is OK if your users are all on the same private server that you self-host/trust. But in practice most users will be on the Matrix equivalent of Gmail, and you’ll be sending this metadata to the largest server in plaintext for every conversation involving one of those users.

I also have trouble where iOS “instant” notifications in SimpleX aren’t delivered–hopefully this gets fixed.

Even if your phone is OFF, it can still track you from the towers and transmit your audio (this is documented in court cases bringing down the mob). It’s built into the chips themselves, at a lower level than the operating system. Do not bring your phones to protests.

My T14 is a great machine. The keyboard is excellent, and its Linux support it great, too. However the screen is pretty bad and has a bad ratio for coding, it always looks dirty because its black shell shows all the oil from your fingerprints. If something breaks out of warranty, you’re pretty much SOL. Whereas with the Framework, I can upgrade and fix any component, up to and including the mainboard/CPU.

I’m super picky with laptops and have a bunch. Thinkpads, Macbooks… Framework 13 AMD is my daily driver that I prefer over all of those. It runs brilliantly with NixOS. I would buy it again in a heartbeat.

Also yes.

For sure, in PCI environments this doesn’t work. And in the Series F company we don’t use this approach for that very reason. But there’s tons of companies that don’t have or need external certifications, and it works for that much more common scenario. For the small web (i.e. most of the web), it’s ideal.

The important takeaway isn’t “wow, doing production builds on your PC isn’t secure.” Do it on a dedicated box in production, then. The important takeaway is there’s a mountain of slow things (GitHub workers, docker caching, etc) which slow developer velocity, and we should design systems and processes which remove or eliminate those pains.

Hi friend, this was just meant to be an introduction, as I get started blogging and sharing back some knowledge and lessons I learned along the way. I’ve never written a blog before (or much of anything!), and I’m sorry you didn’t find value in this.

I wasn’t intending to boast, but I can see how it came across. I just meant to say, “companies are trying to tell you that you need ‘XYZ’ to scale,” and at least at the size of business I ran, you didn’t need any fancy tech at all – we could have made do with a dead-simple setup: a single server running Go and SQLite. It’s something I wish I had known when I started.

I’ll take your feedback to heart and try to produce larger, more substantial posts to follow. Thanks for commenting.

I’m concerned that your preferred solutions may ignore the needs of working with peers. When I’ve worked with similar solutions before, we had a lot of on call, and it all went to the same person, regardless of who actually answered the phone.

Totally hear you and have the same experience myself. The approach I’m advocating for is simply running a binary on a server with rsync to deploy, and architecting your product around that limitation. Teaching a team the basics of Linux sysadmin will be incredibly useful for their careers, and it’s something that the whole team can easily learn. Then you don’t need to hire a k8s team – any engineer can do some basic debugging when things go sideways.

Fair criticism. I wanted to lay the groundwork as I intend for it to be a pretty large resource for people over time. Like starting with chapter one before I write the whole book. I hope you can find some value in some of the stuff to come.

Writing the second post now :-)

Only just started using it, but I love it. Simple, basic blogging without the enshittification of Medium.

Is it too late for, “I use nix btw”? I use it at home and for development.

I planned to focus this blog series on ol’ faithful (Debian), but I could definitely see writing articles on how to use Nix and OpenBSD if people find it helpful.