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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It seems that most in Germany do not understand they’ll give even more of their online freedom away for no net gain.

    Let’s mandate state-sanctioned age verification. Some service may accept this, other won’t. First loss. Then, some kids will get around that with complacent parents. Other will be pressured into it. In the end, it won’t work as a full ban. So, either turn a blind eye to the whole situation (then why bother in the first place), or make it worse: only one account per ID maybe. Big second loss there. And even if it works, it’s ignoring that some sites that would qualify as “social media” are the only communication outlet some people have. Third huge loss.

    This will only be a terrible annoyance to everyone, prevent some services from growing or even exist, to the benefit of kids using their parents accounts anyway or VPNing around it. They learned how to do that very quickly for other online content.

    Laws and rules that are unenforceable at scale are only useful to pin more faults on people when needed, not to help them.





  • I use this setup for my personal passwords, using nextcloud as the sync solution. A semi-fix for that was using Keepass2Android (on Android obviously). It integrates with nextcloud directly, keep a local DB of passwords, and would only load the remote one (and merge) on unlock and updates, not keeping it “constantly” sync on every remote change. It works well… most of the time… with only two devices that almost always have connection to the server… and for only one user.

    It’s overly clunky though. It’s the big advantage of “service based” password manager against “single file based” ones. They handle sync. We have plans to move to bitwarden at my workplace, and since the client supports multiple accounts on multiple servers, I’ll probably move to that for personal stuff too. The convenience is just there, without downside.


  • Except for the part that it’s not a question of trust (being open source), there’s no third-party architecture to trust (it can and should be self-hosted), the data on the server are also encrypted client-side before leaving your device, sure.

    Oh, and you also get proper sync, no risk of desync if two devices gets a change while offline without having to go check your in-house sync solution, easy share between user (still with no trust needed in the server), all working perfectly with good user UI integration for almost every systems.

    Yeah, I wonder why people bother using that, instead of deploying clunky, single-user solution.


  • I understand what you mean. There is an important point here though; we’re not talking about friends, coworkers, that random barista, or anyone else finding out about you after the fact. We’re talking about parents and their kid.

    And I’m not saying it is easy either. But it is the role of parents to look after their kid when they’re young. Nobody’s saying that’s easy, and nobody’s saying that some random busybody should have seen the sign. We’re talking about people that should have been the closest and the most warry about this situation.

    It certainly is possible to miss it. But if the closest, most concerned, most incentivized to care people are not enough to at least have some fleeting suspicion about their kid’s behavior, then we may as well pull the collective plug of our specie outta the wall.






  • Subscription models. Some sites even combine some free articles with it, so that anyone can look into their works, but not necessarily everything. If it fits you, you get a subscription. Sort of the same way people would pay for their daily newspaper.

    It can be argued that “news” should be free, and there are some news site that are basically picking up AP/AFP/whatever and repost these, but actual journalism do requires work.





  • systemd, as a service manager, is decent. Not necessarily a huge improvement for most use cases.

    systemd, the feature creep that decides to pull every single possible use case into itself to manage everything in one place, with qwirks because making a “generic, do everything” piece of software is not a good idea, is not that great.

    systemd, the group of tools that decided to manage everything by rewriting everything from scratch and suffering from the same issue that were fixed decades ago, just because “we can do better” while changing all well known interfaces and causing a schism with either double workload or dropping support for half the landscape from other software developer is really stupid.

    If half the energy that got spent in the “systemd” ecosystem was spent in existing projects and solutions that already addressed these same issues, it’s likely we’d be in a far better place. Alas, it’s a new ecosystem, so we spend a lot of energy getting to the same point we were before. And it’s likely that when we get close to that, something new will show up and start the cycle again.