Sorry, I missed this comment. I actually love doing that kind of shit, I get some sort of weird pleasure out of fixing chaotic stuff like that. That tends to be my role almost all the time; I’ll come in, stay a few years, fix everything and get bored, and then move on somewhere else to do it again.

My current job is the only place that I haven’t done that, because it’s probably the best company that I’ve ever worked for.

I’m in this comment and I don’t like it.

I just finished up a ~700 line PowerShell script to send input/keep a login session from timing out due to inactivity, and prior to that was a Python script to format LetsEncrypt SSL certs in a way haproxy likes + an accompanying Bash script to make sure those certs are correct, check in the current good haproxy config to a git repo, and then restart it if there are new certs.

The only thing that I know is that I know nothing.

Before I replace it with something that won’t catastrophically collapse when the wind blows the wrong way, I get some sort of sick satisfaction out of doing autopsies on the house-built-of-matchsticks “solutions” that users come up with and I don’t know why. Some of them are truly fascinating and make you wonder how someone could possibly arrive at that conclusion based on what they were actually try to achieve.

It’s also why if I’m asked to implement something, my first question isn’t “When does this need to be done?,” it’s “What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve?”

What a user asks for and what they actually need very rarely intersect.

Try submitting a pull request for something in one of the core repos.

They behave as if every line of code in your commit is a sentence proclaiming “Why yes, your wife is a whore, your dog doesn’t love you, AND your baby is ugly.”

I’m not kidding, there’s no hyperbole in that statement. Go read some of their declined pull requests threads for some entertainment.

Even those who try to contribute to the project get eventually feeling pushed out.

Submitting a pull request to one of their repos on Github was really an experience, and I can tell you that I will never submit another one to the Lemmy project while they’re still the lead devs based on that experience.

It would be better to our them on blast on social media since that sometimes gets the companies attention to try and fix PR.

Works almost every time. I had a ticket with a vendor open at work for just about 3 months, and then only replies I’d gotten on the ticket was the “We’ve received your support request which we’ll promptly ignore!” autoresponse upon opening, and then another auto-response a month later saying the ticket was being assigned to another department. I’d replied to the ticket ~20 times asking for updates in that time.

I finally got sick of essentially yelling into an empty room and called out the company, their marketing team, their support team, and their CEO on Twitter, making sure to @ each one of them in the message. I got a reply from their CEO and an actual human responded to the ticket less than an hour later.

It’s shitty and a last resort, but it’s generally very effective.

I have a Hisense and had a similar experience. I was watching something fullscreen on an HDMI input, and then it suddenly switched inputs and showed a fullscreen firmware update prompt. I had no choice available other than to agree to update the firmware, no cancel button, couldn’t change inputs, nothing, the only choice was to update the firmware. So I unplugged the TV.

About 10 seconds after I powered it back on, the exact same update prompt happened, still with no choice to decline it. I pulled power and booted it back up one more time just to be sure, met with the update prompt again.

This made me very angry.

The next time I powered it on, I had a packet capture running to see where it was phoning home. I created a firewall rule blocking all the hostnames it tried to connect to at startup, pulled the plug, and then booted it back up. No more update prompt, and it hasn’t happened again. Good thing they don’t download and pre-stage the new firmware, I guess.

Let me know if you want the hostnames and I’ll PM them to you.

Lots of those in C# now, especially with Unity coming along like it did.

On Error Resume Next never before have more terrible words been spoken.

Every time I’m reading a PowerShell script at work and see -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue I want to scream into a pillow and forcefully revert their commit.

I’ve actually done it a few times, but I want to do it every time.

Eh, it depends. Other low-level things (systemd, glibc, etc) need a reboot too.

It’s likely because they use it as the primary/unique identifier for the account, which is just dumb. It’s like they’ve never heard of a UUID/GUID before.

The fact that Firefox isn’t listed as a browser alternative but Brave is throws any credibility that this article might have straight into the garbage.

Suggesting Brave anything throws its credibility into the shitter, much less multiple times in multiple categories.

Weird. In the email I received, I just clicked the first link and a page opened letting me know I had opted out.

Yeah, not for me. It just went to the main Fi account page when I actually got it to open instead of it trying to open in the Fi app. Maybe an A/B test or something, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I just switched wireless carriers, because fuck all that noise. That shit really rubbed me the wrong way. I might be on the road to completely divorcing myself from Google at this point.

Or just click the link that says to opt out. It will opt you out without doing anything else.

There’s no link in the email to opt out. The email gives you instructions on how to opt out and a link to the Fi website, but no direct link.

The instructions also don’t work by default, because once you log in to the Fi website, it automatically redirects you to the Fi app which conveniently doesn’t have the opt out option available to toggle. You have to either uninstall the Fi app or manually turn off its ability to open fi.google.com URLs to actually opt out.

I don’t think that was an accident for even half a second, and I’m pretty sure that it just pushed me to switch carriers.

Google Fi is exclusive to U.S. customers so it doesn’t matter if it breaks GDPR.

Yeah it does. GDPR applies for EU citizens regardless of where they are. It’s why every website in the fucking world has a cookie banner now. An EU citizen could register for Fi service with a VPN and a mailbox at a UPS store and Google’s handling of their data would be subject to GDPR.

So yeah, it definitely matters, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get sued because of this.

I’m considering switching everything to Debian eventually, but there’s a couple dedicated repos that make using Fedora on my laptop much easier for now.

I’d recommend against that. Debian is fantastic for a server, but I think it leaves a lot to be desired as a workstation OS as compared to Fedora.

You can get it there/make it that way, but Fedora is just better from a user experience/convenience perspective out of the box.

BTW, any authenticator app works when it tells you to use one. They all use a standard, so it doesn’t matter which one you use.

Eh, it’s a little more nuanced than that, there’re more standards for MFA code generation than just TOTP.

And even within the TOTP standard, there are options to adjust the code generation (timing, hash algorithm, # of characters in the generated code, etc.) that not all clients are going to support or will be user-configureable. Blizzard’s Battle.net MFA is a good example of that.

If the code is just your basic 6-digit HMAC/SHA1 30-second code, yeah, odds are almost 100% that your client of choice will support it, but anything other than that I wouldn’t automatically assume that it’s going to work.

A times B times C equals X… I am jacks something something something

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.

Woman on Plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn’t believe.

Woman on Plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.

really wish Linux would could up something similar.

I mean, it kinda already exists. Just run it in a Docker container and remap the users in the container to non-existent uids/gids on the host.

If Linux was dominant it wouldn’t be Linux. There would be more pressure to monetize and there would always be someone willing to sell out for that money. You can see this even in the Linux community today. I’m sorry I had to be so negative about it though, it sounds nice.

This is a very Desktop/workstation-centric view of the situation and you’re completely neglecting 3/4ths of the story. Linux is already hilariously dominant on the on-prem server and Cloud side of things. Like, it’s not even close. Pretty much any website you visit, the odds are overwhelming that it’s running Linux. Even Microsoft runs most of the underlying infrastructure for Azure and Github on Linux. Android is the #1 mobile phone platform in the world, which runs on, you guessed it, Linux.

And it’s already monetized to the gills. Red Hat has multi-billion earnings per quarter, every quarter, and Canonical is almost certainly going to IPO this year.

It’s already dominant in pretty much every space it touches and it has been for a very long time. Desktop/workstation is pretty much the singular exception to that.