I haven’t really got enough information about that side of it, the details I have to go on are mostly about things particularly around the values CCC has tried to hold/build (and even there I am absolutely not intimately familiar, for reasons of distance and exposure and such)

yep, have made the same critique. the way people “overcommit” on this is a fascinating interplay of sunk cost fallacy combined with some other shit

why they even are there

(from observation over some years) congress orga more than occasionally fucks up on paradox of tolerance by letting shit like this through

it’s been a thing I’ve noticed and have wanted to actually discuss with some folks, but never really gotten to yet on account of life stuff

there were also the much, much less grey-area instances a couple of years back where they were far too open to a number of abusers (this was around the time the appelbaum shit hit wide daylight), so there is a possibility that the issue runs deeper (in a structural sense, at best; personal sense, at worst) too but I possess insufficient information to know one way or the other what exactly may constitute the problem here

full service plagiarism! bet you we’ll see whiteglove variant of it next

idle datapoint: the first “not a sketchy domain clearly trying to circumvent” site I’ve seen in quite a while that has an ad immediately visible despite my regular blocker config

revenue must be sparse!

(it takes specific pointed work to circumvent, so someone had to have reason to do it)

I was trying to remember at which point I unfollowed him, and I think it was exactly this nonsense

tangentially: I’ve been getting reminded of a bunch of services existing, by way of pointless “your year in review” bullshit

fuck spotify for starting that misfeature, and fuck everyone else for falling over themselves to get On Trend

let me spell it out for you: don’t be such an ass.

a swing with a double miss

I’ve seen what effort goes into it at somewhere else, it’s a lot

not sure I’d say it’s unprofitable though, given just how goddamn much money google does make from its advertising monopoly. but I get what you meant with the conversion angle nonetheless

no to this, kthx

still don’t get it

what

Oh yeah I forgot to mention that in my comment: drop PIA. Never touch anything owned by PIA or Kape. Ever.

GPUs: not even once

I am in the same boat, except all of the software I’ve ever written has been TeX

I’m sorry

giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why ∞ is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode

that sound you can hear is my despairing screaming[0]

VPN client where … jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client

(not a pitch, but multiple commercial references) I really liked how simple tunnelbear made this for a lot, and also quite like how slick the wireguard desktop-style handling is (you can see this for example with fly.io’s integration to that). I think there’s long context here, and if you buy me a beer I could rant in detail

PS: There is Goldwarden

oh good, it’s in Go, my other code allergy

shitposting aside, re the password manager thing: @self and I have co-ranted in dms, and about similar gripes.

so, by way of idea, loose laundry list for foundations/design: modern crypto (jfc why is so much still going “yeah gpg is fine”), crdt sync, a sane fucking language to build everything on, own-devices friendly (in the “you can sync device to device peer-wise” sense, vs the “there’s a remote server broker” sense), and pretty okay™ interfaces for client building/extensibility

alas: my main workstation is (non-slate) macos, and it’s unchangeable for the foreseeable future

good to know those (already) exist as options, though. if I can find some spoons I’ll try look around and see if there’s maybe something similar I can hack up/agglutinate from what’s around

Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway

I haven’t even tried it yet because I’m real “ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh” about even the idea of a js-/ts-based gui client for my password manager. largely because I’ve met too many js/ts devs and I outright don’t trust their competence and processes. so your post is definite motivation for me to eyeball some of the other clients too

this is such a mess, holy shit

and only on .com? I have some very pointed questions about the maturity of the verification program/design

also, how are you liking bitwarden?

I really need to kill off my current password manager and bitwarden’s looking like the least worst of current options (esp. when paired with something like vaultwarden instead of running a fucking nodejs sync server on the internet), but also some of it seems quite stunted[0]

it’s gotten so bad that I’ve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

[0] - no global hotkeys? the fuck

last time it came up, tuta was the least worst of the mail options. it’s not the same offering as proton’s in-garden encrypted, but nothing is afaik. rest of it is pretty okay (I have some (not all[0]) domains on there)

the rest of the things I don’t have a direct recommendation in part because [0] and in part because I don’t use computers entirely like how a lot of people do. that said

storage: backblaze storage pricing is not bad. they might have a desktop app thing? calendar: caldav is a dark art beyond my ken - I haven’t even got that shit playing nice on my own things[3]. fuck knows who does this well. vpn: mullvad[1] (has quite recently had another full assessment published). maybe njalla[2]?

[0] - I’m one of those crotchety fuckers that still has a whole pile of self-hosted things that have been going 15~20y

[1] - seems okay and to have their head on straight. haven’t used myself.

[2] - also haven’t used it myself, comes from some of the folks of the TPB gang

[3] - admittedly I haven’t tried that hard because I don’t need it much, but it is extremely goddamn annoying to debug from clients