Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
    5Ā·
    2 days ago

    also, how are you liking bitwarden?

    I am happy with it. That they only charge $10 a year for services I donā€™t even need (I could use a separate 2FA app) and allow you to self-host is a good sign. I plan to eventually set up a workflow in Sway (Wayland tiling WM) with a CLI tool (e.g. https://crates.io/crates/rbw, or the official one), so the interface is not terribly important to me. I would definitely recommend trying a free account to see if it fits into your workflow.

    itā€™s gotten so bad that Iā€™ve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

    I am in the same boat, except all of the software Iā€™ve ever written has been TeX, or giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why āˆž is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode. So I am only theoretically up to the task, which is ā€¦ IDK maybe I should start grifting?

    But for real, I have considered writing my own:

    • VPN client where we donā€™t have to jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client, or finding out that their client runs like ass in Linux (Proton)
    • Password Manager
    • Config editor, so I donā€™t have to edit /home/${USERNAME}/.config/sway/config.d/90-fuckyou-this-is-where-we-keep-system-suspend-shit.conf every time I want to change something. ā€œOh no you gotta edit the Kanshi config for that one.ā€ Itā€™s tedious to remember where various programs look for the config and whatever particular syntax is chosen (isnā€™t this fucking solved with toml files already?)
    • An Android reminder app that isnā€™t some stupid Taylorist metric-worshipping bullshit.

    PS: There is Goldwarden which I know absolutely nothing about but looks neat. It does suggest that you could just write your own that is bitwarden compatible.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      5Ā·
      2 days ago

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

      Iā€™m sorry

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

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

      VPN client where ā€¦ 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.ioā€™s integration to that). I think thereā€™s long context here, and if you buy me a beer I could rant in detail

      PS: There is Goldwarden

      oh good, itā€™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 ā€œyeah gpg is fineā€), crdt sync, a sane fucking language to build everything on, own-devices friendly (in the ā€œyou can sync device to device peer-wiseā€ sense, vs the ā€œthereā€™s a remote server brokerā€ sense), and pretty okayā„¢ interfaces for client building/extensibility

      • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
        6Ā·
        2 days ago

        Iā€™m sorry

        me too, also i lied/forgot to mention that my particular PhD situation is so fucked up that i went from pure mathematics to cuda

          • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
            8Ā·
            2 days ago

            That is a good rule. The GPU programmers seem to think this is good code and that itā€™s well-documented. I am still pretty out of my depth in this field, but it feels so silly to me. There is this historical bullshit about fortran only allowing 5 characters for a function name, and that (combined with some appeal to domain-specific knowledge) is used to justify stupid, freshman level shit like

            if uplo == 'U':
    # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for upper triangular matrices
else:  # just assume it's always U or L without checking, god forbid you use something modern like an enum, or even just a boolean
    # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for lower triangular matrices

            edit: if memory serves, booleans were first discovered in 2011 by John T. Boole, which is why they donā€™t show up in fortran