namingthingsiseasy
@namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
- Comment on The creator of systemd wants your entire system validated by SecureBoot 6 days ago:
I just don’t want see the garbage that is the Android Play Store where apps refuse to run because we run an OS that isn’t profitable to Google.
I think the possibility that this could happen is dangerously high.
Everything starts with good intentions. Everything ultimately leads to locking end users out of their personal freedoms.
- Comment on The creator of systemd wants your entire system validated by SecureBoot 6 days ago:
I’ve made other comments before about how we used to cheer for Google back in the 00’s because they were the upstart that took on the entrenched competitors (Microsoft primarily). Look what Google has become today - the very thing we hoped they would destroy, and they are so much worse about it.
Red Hat/IBM ultimately owned by the same people as Google: shareholders. Nothing will ever stand in the way of their greed. If this technology is allowed to exist, there’s no reason to think that it too will be used against our interests.
- Comment on The creator of systemd wants your entire system validated by SecureBoot 6 days ago:
He was there for a brief period. According to Wikipedia he was there from 2022-2026 and seems to have left to create his new company in early 2026.
- Comment on systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success 6 days ago:
Btw, i’m stealing your summary of browser monoculture, alright?
Of course! The EEE pattern is crystal clear at this point. The loss of the WWW to the current browser monoculture we’re experiencing is the biggest technological tragedy of our times. I would hate to see it happen with our open source revolution as well.
- Submitted 6 days ago to technology@lemmy.world | 79 comments
- Comment on systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success 6 days ago:
I’m so tired of reading this stupid argument. “People only dislike systemd because they’re afraid of change.” No, there are plenty of other concerning issues about it. I could probably write about a lot of problems with systemd (like the fact that my work laptop never fucking shuts down properly), but here’s the real issue:
Do you really think it’s a good idea for Red Hat to have total control over the most important component of every mainstream distro in existence?
Let’s consider an analogy: in 2008, Chrome was the shit. Everyone loved it, thought it was great and started using it, and adoption reached ~20-30% overnight. Alternatives started falling by the wayside. Then adoption accelerated thanks to shady tactics like bundling, silently changing users’ default browser, marketing it everywhere and downranking websites that didn’t conform to its “standards” in Google search. And next, Chrome adopted all kinds of absurdly complex standards forcing all other browser engines to shut down and adopt Chrome’s engine instead because nobody could keep up with the development effort. And once they achieved world domination, then we started facing things like adblockers being banned, browser-exclusive DRM, and hardware attestation.
That’s exactly what Red Hat is trying to pull in systemd. Same adoption story - started out as a nice product, definitely better than the original default (SysVInit). Then started pushing adoption aggressively by campaigning major distros to adopt it (Debian in particular). Then started absorbing other standard utilities like logind and udev. Leveraging Gnome to push systemd as a hard dependency.
Now systemd is at the world domination stage. Nobody knew what Chrome was going to do when it was at this point a decade ago, but now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly see that monoculture was clearly not a good idea. Are people so fucking stupid that they think that systemd/Red Hat will buck that trend and be benevolent curators of the open source Linux ecosystem in perpetuity? Who knows what nefarious things they could possibly do…
But there are hints, I suppose. By the way, check out Poettering’s new startup: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
- Comment on Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software 1 week ago:
Dear Google: we wouldn’t have to do this if you weren’t such a shit company.
Oh, you weren’t aware that you’re a shit company? You legitimately believe you’re a positive force for the world? Well that’s your own damn fault.
- Comment on Meta really wants you to believe social media addiction is 'not a real thing' 1 week ago:
What a great idea! Just claim your product is healthy to people that don’t care about their health!
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Interesting. Were you using a Jenkinsfile? I’m not sure I completely understand your use case, but using a Jenkinsfile would mean that your entire pipeline would be defined in a file in source control, so you could roll it back if you made a change that didn’t work quite right. Seems to be what your looking for if I’m understanding what you’re looking for.
- Comment on Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public 1 month ago:
I looked at it for 5 seconds. The UI looked pretty hideous. Even new reddit looks better than it.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I’ve found the edit/test/debug loop in Jenkins to be much faster than Github Actions. It was quite a refreshing change when I made that transition.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
The best way I found to do this is by commenting out the portions of the build that take the longest.
Which is stupid, but that’s what you get with Microsoft products.
(I get that there may be ways to test this locally, but I found this method to be the easiest.)
- Comment on Microsoft may soon allow IT admins to uninstall Copilot 1 month ago:
I thought they renamed their entire product line to “Copilot” by now, didn’t they?
Uninstalling it at this point would leave absolutely nothing left!
- Comment on Through gritted teeth, Apple and Google allow alternative app stores in Japan 2 months ago:
Cupertino has complied anyway, and said it introduced “Notarization for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and requirements that help protect children from inappropriate content and scams.”
Notarization requirements mean that they still maintain total control over the operating system and what software it can run. These kinds of onerous requirements keep the bar artificially high for competitors and are only possible because they are still enforcing their monopolistic control over the platform.
So no, they’re not complying at all actually. They’re just doing the same thing in a different way.
- Comment on Do we have No Man's Sky fans here? 2 months ago:
Agreed, and it feels like a waste of so much great potential when you consider the fantastic development they poured into it. Such a shame.
- Comment on Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox 2 months ago:
It’s hard to beat the last one, but he somehow managed to pull it off.
Then again, Mitchell Baker is still on the board of directors if I’m not mistaken, so it sounds like the rot is too pervasive for just one CEO to change.
- Comment on Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox 2 months ago:
I was having issues with Librewolf on a work computer a few weeks ago, so I decided to try Firefox to see if it was LW’s security settings.
Holy shit, what a fucking trainwreck Firefox has become! It’s so bad that I can’t honestly recommend anyone use it anymore. The first time I started it, I saw all kinds of ads and trashy “news” articles that had no relevance to me whatsoever. Plus I had to reinstall all my extensions because they weren’t signed and there’s no way to disable that requirement. I was so horrified and offended, I just dumped it immediately and tried Chrome instead. What difference is there at this point?
It’s just insulting at this point. I understand that they trying to find new revenue sources, and things are still better today than they were with Mitchell Baker as CEO, but it’s still horrific how poorly Mozilla is being run. I’m so grateful we still have usable forks from the amazing people running projects like Librewolf. Without them, the web would just be flat out unusable.
- Comment on UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones 2 months ago:
I bet he takes a bath in a swimsuit
- Comment on UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones 2 months ago:
This has been very obvious to a lot of people since mobile devices were originally invented. The notion that you are sold a product that you “own” but is still 100% controlled by the vendor - anyone who thought about it for more than a second knew that it would eventually come to this. Of course, nobody gave even that tiny amount of thought about it. Or they were too naïve to think that a corporation could ever be evil.
I miss the times when spyware was considered uncoool. Mobile devices are the undoubtedly the worst invention of the information age. (And social media is probably the second worst.)
- Comment on Do we have No Man's Sky fans here? 2 months ago:
I enjoy it. It’s a relaxing, peaceful game. I just wish there were more objectives. The idea of just exploring and finding things doesn’t appeal to me all that much. The game has a lot of potential for combat, both in the spaceship and as a FPS, but both of these areas feel like they could be expanded a bit. Overall, I just wish that there were more combat-focused missions after completing the main storyline.
But it’s still pretty good and I enjoy it when I want to relax.
- Comment on I dunno 2 months ago:
I fell for it. It’s crazy to think how heavily I’ve been trained to believe everything I see is wrong in the most embarrassing and laughable way possible. That’s pretty depressing if you think about it.
- Comment on Windows president says platform is "evolving into an agentic OS," gets cooked in the replies — "Straight up, nobody wants this" 3 months ago:
“Straight up, nobody wants this”
And they don’t fucking care. They’re going to do it anyways.
You can either do something about it, or just bend over and let them fuck you. That’s what you get for depending on someone else’s platform.
- Comment on Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show 3 months ago:
The funny thing is, before Google existed, people had no idea if their marketing attempts were working. Maybe they had some ways of knowing or guessing, but there was no way to know how accurate their metrics were. Internet-based advertising, and tracking-based advertising in particular was supposed to change that.
And now that we sit here with a duopoly of advertising giants, we’re back to the stage where marketers just have to trust that their provider is giving them good helpful information. And how are they supposed to know whether they really can believe it or not? They can’t of course! So we’ve come right back to where we’ve started.
But considering they still spent tons of money before Google and Facebook gave them these “analytics”, it looks like they probably don’t even care that much.
- Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds 4 months ago:
Pathlib is very nice indeed, but I can understand why a lot of languages don’t do similar things. There are major challenges implementing something like that. Cross-platform functionality is a big one, for example. File permissions between Unix systems and Windows do not map perfectly from one system to another which can be a maintenance burden.
But I do agree. As a user, it feels great to have. And yes, also in general, the things Python does with its standard library are definitely the way things should be done, from a user’s point of view at least.
- Comment on Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books 5 months ago:
Of course. It’s all about control. They see users as property, an object to be sold and traded.
Do not ever allow yourselves to be disrespected like this.
- Comment on A ‘demoralizing' trend has computer science grads out of work — even minimum wage jobs. Are 6-figure tech careers over? 5 months ago:
can’t even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know
University is not a job training program though. A degree demonstrates that you have the skills to figure things out, not that you already have everything figured out. Even with decades of experience, it takes me a bit of time to spin up on a new library, framework, programming language, etc.
Companies are supposed to provide this training, not just to new hires, but to all employees. It does take a little extra time to teach new hires, but their salaries are also lower so it should balance out. And if they want to keep those employees around, then they should give them generous pay increases so they don’t just jump for a salary increase.
- Comment on Tesla loses Autopilot wrongful death case in $329 million verdict 6 months ago:
Not to mention tone-deaf. Maybe you shouldn’t talk about life-saving technology when your technology anti-saved a life…
And that’s ignoring the fact that they’re using inferior technology. Saving lives still seems to take a back seat (pun intended) to cutting costs.
- Comment on Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store 6 months ago:
That’s fair, but to me, the cost of a new device isn’t how much I pay for it - it’s the time I invest in using it and maintaining it, as well as how much I rely on it. The biggest reason that I think open hardware and software is important is not just the cost, but the reliability - the fact that it will still be working tomorrow. That is worth a lot more than money to me!
- Comment on Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store 6 months ago:
The tactic only becomes illegal when it confers the ability to exclude competitors from the market.
You’re probably right in a legal sense, but I think that’s a bit stupid. It’s very difficult to draw a line that delineates between when a company has the ability to exclude competitors or not. It requires a lot of costly legal battles and a length appeal process to prove, and nobody will create that court case without significant financial means to be able to prove all of it. And if the court rules against you, all of that time, money and effort achieved nothing and just leaves you with a heavily damaged reputation.
From a practical perspective, it sounds like a very weak legal framework.
- Comment on Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store 6 months ago:
Exactly. All these devices can just be bricked the moment some corporation decides they’re not worth supporting anymore. Never buy a device that is so heavily dependent on running on another company’s services.