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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I can understand why it excites you. But I’m old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I’m perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.

    Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that’s designed to do exactly this.




  • I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.

    I agree with this part.

    GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization.

    Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, “Yeah, no! I don’t want to learn that many tools”.

    Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools.

    The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.





  • I switched nearly two decades ago after I used a freeware network monitor on Windows and realized that it was making dozens of silent TCP connections online. Some were to Microsoft, while others were to unknown third parties. Just imagine your personal machine doing this!

    Linux is actually easy to use these days. Installation is often easier than windows and hardware just works most of the time. Despite that, people have a habit of exaggerating the difficulties in using Linux or BSD. They very often feel like excuses to avoid checking it out.






  • I have heard this tape. While it’s distressing, it’s something worth hearing. Not because it’s pleasant to listen to people die. But because it’s worth remembering their pain so that those mistakes are never repeated again.

    Remember that the engineers, technicians and other support staff of Apollo 1 didn’t have the option of turning off the audio either (I listened to it to partially feel what they felt). They worked feverishly to save their colleagues who were burning to death only a few inches away from them. And to finally reach them to find out that it was all in vain.

    This would have been a horrifyingly painful experience for NASA. And it did have an impact. NASA changed in an instant. No effort was spared in keeping the future astronauts safe. So much so that a deeply crippled Apollo 13 still made it back safely. And no lives were ever again lost on the Apollo missions. That’s the power of a personal connection to a tragedy. I watch a lot of accident investigation documentaries, including rail, aviation and space. Nothing drives the lessons deep like the depiction of human tragedy.

    Just imagine. If only the aircraft manufacturers could see the final moments of the passengers that die in their low quality aircrafts. Perhaps they would try hard to avoid such incidents rather than chase profits at any cost.

    RIP: Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, Ed White. The bravehearts of Apollo 1.