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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • I feel so sorry for recommending a closed source app in this community, but Genius Scan from Grizzly Labs is the only non-oss app I still use. I think I paid around €30 for the enterprise version so it doesn’t bother me with cloud nonsense.

    It’s all local only (if you want) and the scanning quality is the best I’ve found. (I used OpenNoteScanner for a few months, sadly it’s not even close both in terms of quality and convenience)

    I figured I’ll mention it as an alternative to MS Lens app that likely sucks in every bit of information it can get its hands on.



  • You can’t do much about users that just don’t care. But more technically inclined folks often do care and these are the people that develop the web and maintain the computer/browser for other people.

    A lot of folks in my circle use chrome, but the moment the AdBlock plugin stops working they’ll likely switch to anything that works better. They are not necessarily too concerned about privacy, but they also don’t want to have most of their browsing made effectively impossible by ads everywhere.

    I mean, just try and use the web without any sort of blocking. A lot of sites don’t even have their content visible.


  • I don’t have much experience with TS, but in other strongly typed language it goes even further than string vs number.

    For example you can have two numbers Distance and TimeInSeconds and even though they are both numbers, the type system can make sure that you won’t do distance+time.

    It can also let you do distance/time and return Speed type.

    It will prevent many logical errors even though everything is technically a number.






  • “If” being the key word here. There are nuances to be considered. One DB might run really well on arm, the other not so much.

    I’m saying it as huge fan of the arm servers. They are amazing and often save a lot of money essentially for free. (practically only a few characters change in terraform) In AWS with the hosted services (Opensearch, and such) there’s usually no good reason to pay extra for x86 hardware especially since most of the intricacies are handled by AWS.

    But there are workloads that just do not run on arm all that well and you would end up paying more for the HW to get to the performance levels you had with x86.

    And that’s beside all those little pain points mentioned above that you’re “left to deal with” which isn’t cheap either. (but that doesn’t show up on the AWS bill, so management is happy to report cost savings)


  • I’m not sure where this idea of high profile target comes from. The sim swap attack is pretty common. People just need to be in some credentials leak DB with some hint of crypto trading or having some somewhat interesting social media account. (either interesting handle or larger number of followers)

    There are now organized groups that essentially provide sim swap as a service. Sometimes employees of the telco company are in on it. The barrier to entry is not that high, so the expected reward does not need to be that much higher.




  • Yeah it’s pretty amazing system all things considered. It’s kind of as if 8-bit home computer systems continued to evolve, but keep the same principles of being really closely tied to the HW and with very blurry line between kernel and user space. It radiates strong user ownership of the system. If you look at modern systems where you sometimes don’t even get superuser privileges (for better of worse) it’s quite a contrast.

    Which is why it reminds me of Emacs so much. You can mess with most of the internals, there’s no major separation between “Emacs-space” and userspace. There are these jokes about Emacs being OS, but it really does remind me of those early days of home computing where you could tinker with low level stuff and there were no guardrails or locks stopping you.




  • Perhaps it’s kind of inevitable to have some bloat. For example apps these days handle most of the languages just fine including emoji, LTR/RTL and stuff. Some have pretty decent accessibility support. They can render pretty complicated interface at 8k screen reasonably fast. (often accelerated in some way) There is a ton of functionality baked in - your editor can render your html or markdown side by side with source code as you edit it. You have version control, terminal emulator, language servers, etc…

    But then there’s Electron, which just takes engine capable of rendering anything and uses it to render UI, so as a result there’s not much optimization you can do. Button is actually a bunch of DOM elements wrapped in CSS… Etc… It’s just good enough for the “hardware is cheap” approach.

    I think Emacs is a good example to look at. It has a ton of built in functionality and with many plugins (either custom configuration or something like Doom Emacs) you can have very capable editor very comparable to the likes of VS Code. Decades back Emacs had this reputation of being bloated, because it used Megabytes of RAM. These days it’s even more “bloated” due to all the stuff that was added since. But in absolute numbers it does not need as much resources as its Electron based peers. The difference can easily be order of magnitude or more depending on configuration.