Yeah, that is a valid opinion to hold. I am saying that trust is garbage.
You could consider compiling the KeePass app yourself, if you’re worried about that one in particular.
A guy I used to study with, decided that he just wouldn’t have a password manager on his phone.
I’ve certainly considered switching to a Linux phone for that, among many other reasons…
If you type “about:profiles” into the URL-bar and create a fresh profile there, does it also happen in that?
(It will practically be like a factory-reset Firefox, except you can go back to your current data/profile.)
This F-Droid-like model (also popularly implemented by Linux distributions) is usually considered an improvement in security.
The thing with FOSS is that ideally you don’t have to trust the developer at all.
In theory, you could read the entire source code and compile it yourself. Then you’d know for sure that no malware is included.
Obviously, in practice, you can only hope that some nerds dig into the source code and notify journalists of malware-like behaviour.
It is no perfect protection. But it is the only tangible protection that FOSS actually delivers.
What does not protect you, is to trust each individual developer. They could publish innocous source code and then build the release binaries from a version with the malware-like behaviour patched in.
But because you likely don’t want to compile each app yourself, you might still feel compelled to entrust that work to a third party. This is where the F-Droid team comes in. Rather than trusting each developer, you just have to trust a single team.
Well, and if an app is built in a reproducible build, then even the work from the F-Droid team can be verified.
See “What are my options if I want to install unsigned extensions in Firefox?” in the FAQ here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#FAQ
If you’re on Linux, you may have that about:config flag even in your distro-provided Firefox Stable build…
It’s mostly intended for webdevs wanting access to new web standards ahead of time and extension developers, who can install unsigned/development versions of their extensions into there.
It’s certainly not a must-have for any devs out there…
I’m excited for these, especially with them likely coming for stable Firefox soon, too. My $DAYJOB hands out Ubuntu laptops and every time, we have to scrape off the Firefox Snap, because e.g. saving images doesn’t work and the Downloads directory is in some mystical place somewhere underneath ~/snap/. These APTs will almost restore the usability of other distros…
I’m having a hard time figuring out, if these exist elsewhere, but over here, I can buy dried soy shreds, which are really great for pasta.
So, those are roughly meatball-shaped. There’s also smaller one’s which kind of work in sauces like minced meat.
They don’t taste like meat, more like wheat, but they give you the same protein and chewiness and can be kept in a cupboard basically until the end of time.
Ültrafast
Wenn beim Angelsächsischen mal wieder das Sächsische durchkommt…
I don’t see why they should send the URL somewhere. For Googley reasons, most tracking parameters start with “utm_”. You can remove those pretty naïvely, generally without links breaking.
If it helps, the Windows/Linux logic is basically:
Well, and Ctrl, Alt, Shift also serve for alternative characters when you’re typing. And some application or OS shortcuts wildly combine modifiers for more complex keybindings. And of course, some applications just didn’t get the note of how this generally works. I won’t claim, it really follows rules, but yeah, it’s not generally complete chaos either.
I think, what you’re describing used to be a thing, but there’s now a somewhat different, more granular way of rebinding keybindings:
However, it should be said that these will only apply within KDE applications. If you’re using third-party stuff, like Firefox, GIMP, VLC etc., they won’t apply.
If you really want to go hard on rebinding all kinds of keys for any application, you can also do things like these:
As cool as both of these are, and as much as I would still generally recommend picking KDE for these kind of customization possibilities, I wouldn’t recommend overdoing either. You won’t be able to use other PCs anymore…
Pictures are probably better than a thousand words here:
I’m a massive fan of GUIDs, too, but you’d have no protection from rogue instances reusing GUIDs of existing posts…
Very weird example to me, with the LLM chatbot video. Like, yeah, interacting with an LLM can be interesting, but you’re not going to learn anything meaningful about it.
And when I jumped into the middle of the video, that looked pretty much exactly as I expected, too. The guy was tweaking the pre-query and then chatting with the chatbot to see how it turned out. So, they didn’t do/learn much coding either.
There is all that surrounding technology, which you are inevitably going to learn something about, but ultimately this is what I find so tiring about LLMs. I can learn something about the surrounding technology and tackle a topic which is meaningfully interesting at the same time. Unless I had a problem which a custom adaptation of an LLM could solve, why would I choose to play with it?
Hmm, they are for me. It just switches to the left-most unpinned tab.
Yeah, I found it quite interesting, too. To some degree, I’ve been wondering why it’s so natural for programmers to be programming language polyglots, even if they’re not actively nerds/excited about them.
And yeah, this discussion made me realize that you basically can’t take a single step in programming without being confronted with multiple languages/syntaxes at once.
Ah, right, my interpretation is that as long as you don’t need to touch the source code, you’re good.
But yeah, it’s certainly not as clear cut. My pick would actually be Rust, because you can use it for pretty much everything, including web frontends via WebAssembly.
However, in that case, you still write HTML+CSS, which technically may or may not be programming languages, and the DOM API is actually only documented in JavaScript. So, I wouldn’t need to write JS, but would still want to read it…
Yeah, C libraries can be used in basically any mature language. It’s just too useful to not have.
And Rust, since it doesn’t need a runtime, can emulate the format of C libraries.
Rust libraries can also specifically target Python via https://pyo3.rs, but as I understand, this just does the C library format, plus a basic Python wrapper to make it nicer to use.
These exist in theory, but as a whole, I’ve never seen them working at even the base level of what you get in other languages.
Adding type hints to your code is fucking exhausting, because there is no type inference.
MyPy regularly calls it quits, when any library doesn’t have type hints.
PyCharm regularly doesn’t properly auto-complete, because it doesn’t have type information (if it can load your project correctly to begin with).
Unit tests exist, yes, but you need 100% test coverage to make the language properly check all code paths. Without it, even just calling a library isn’t guaranteed to work. In no fully statically typed language, would I recommend 100% test coverage, unless you have special correctness requirements.
Normally, I would reply to the guy, because, you know, he’s a human being, but there’s so many replies, I doubt, he can actually read all of them and potentially someone else has already made that point.
Anyways, I feel like something he kind of misses here is that many of us do it from a heartfelt place. Like, we’re all techies. We’ve all used commercial software to a point where we’ve grown so frustrated with it that we decided it is a waste of time.
So, it’s not us saying “Why don’t you go and just have more time/money?”.
Rather, it’s us saying “This thing is wasting your time? Here is a solution that I felt wasted less time in the long run.”.
Yes, sometimes that does miss the mark, because not every complaint is looking for a solution. Or because we may be frustrated with restrictions of commercial software, which are not a problem for less techy people. Or even because we’re embedded in this tech world and are hoping to make it a better place, which someone just quickly visiting may not care about.
But other times, I do just happen to know a lot about technology and a non-techy genuinely did not know about the solution I suggested and is actually really appreciative of me bringing it up. It does happen. And it’s not easy to discern who would appreciate a suggestion and who won’t.