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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Yāall, with Proton enshittifying (scribe and wallet nonsense), I think I am never going to sign up for another all-in-one service like this. Now I gotta determine what to do about:
and Iād be forced to reassess my password manager if hadnāt already been using BitWarden when Proton Pass came out.
Self-hosting is a non-starter (too lazy to remember a new password for my luggage). Any thoughts? Are other Proton users here jumping ship? Should I just resign myself to using Proton until they eventually force some stupid ass āChatbot will look at the contents of your Drive and tell you which authorities to surrender yourself toā?
I am no tech expert but I use tuta for email and disroot for forms, pads and file sharing.
For VPNs, at least, I can offer some suggestions. If you wanted to securely access a specific box or network of yours, tailscale is pretty great and very painless to use. If you wanted to do stuff without various folk noticing then thatās a bit trickier but Iāve been happy using mullvadā¦ theyāre not the cheapest, though they have some splendid anonymous payment mechanisms (you can literally mail them a wad of banknotes with a magic code on a bit of paperā¦ you donāt even need to muck about with bitcoin).
I have a subscription for Private Internet Access that I was using before subscribing to Proton Mail (which comes with Proton VPN). I figured it was all the same (they all have a slightly skeezy feel to me).
Then I checked out Mullvadās website and itās really quite awesome. Everything about their service has a āwe want to make this accessible to everyoneā vibe, which I appreciate. I am going to try it out. <3
Oh yeah I forgot to mention that in my comment: drop PIA. Never touch anything owned by PIA or Kape. Ever.
Yeah I stopped using it after switching to Proton.
also, how are you liking bitwarden?
I really need to kill off my current password manager and bitwardenās 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]
itās gotten so bad that Iāve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me
[0] - no global hotkeys? the fuck
I am happy with it. That they only charge $10 a year for services I donāt even need (I could use a separate 2FA app) and allow you to self-host is a good sign. I plan to eventually set up a workflow in Sway (Wayland tiling WM) with a CLI tool (e.g. https://crates.io/crates/rbw, or the official one), so the interface is not terribly important to me. I would definitely recommend trying a free account to see if it fits into your workflow.
I am in the same boat, except all of the software Iāve ever written has been TeX, or giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why
dp[i][j]is a shit table name or whyāis better thanfloat('inf')orMAX_INTin pseudocode. So I am only theoretically up to the task, which is ā¦ IDK maybe I should start grifting?But for real, I have considered writing my own:
/home/${USERNAME}/.config/sway/config.d/90-fuckyou-this-is-where-we-keep-system-suspend-shit.confevery time I want to change something. āOh no you gotta edit the Kanshi config for that one.ā Itās tedious to remember where various programs look for the config and whatever particular syntax is chosen (isnāt this fucking solved withtomlfiles already?)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.
Iām sorry
that sound you can hear is my despairing screaming[0]
(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.ioās integration to that). I think thereās long context here, and if you buy me a beer I could rant in detail
oh good, itās 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 āyeah gpg is fineā), crdt sync, a sane fucking language to build everything on, own-devices friendly (in the āyou can sync device to device peer-wiseā sense, vs the āthereās a remote server brokerā sense), and pretty okayā¢ interfaces for client building/extensibility
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
GPUs: not even once
That is a good rule. The GPU programmers seem to think this is good code and that itās 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 matricesedit: if memory serves, booleans were first discovered in 2011 by John T. Boole, which is why they donāt show up in fortran
They have a CLI app though which you can hook up to dmenu or rofi or whatever to get global shortcuts.
https://github.com/firecat53/bitwarden-menu
Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway. I just use the CLI and the Firefox extension and itās working solid.
alas: my main workstation is (non-slate) macos, and itās unchangeable for the foreseeable future
good to know those (already) exist as options, though. if I can find some spoons Iāll try look around and see if thereās maybe something similar I can hack up/agglutinate from whatās around
I havenāt even tried it yet because Iām real āehhhhhhhhhhhhhhā about even the idea of a js-/ts-based gui client for my password manager. largely because Iāve met too many js/ts devs and I outright donāt trust their competence and processes. so your post is definite motivation for me to eyeball some of the other clients too
last time it came up, tuta was the least worst of the mail options. itās not the same offering as protonās 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 donāt have a direct recommendation in part because [0] and in part because I donāt 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 havenāt 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] - Iām 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. havenāt used myself.
[2] - also havenāt used it myself, comes from some of the folks of the TPB gang
[3] - admittedly I havenāt tried that hard because I donāt need it much, but it is extremely goddamn annoying to debug from clients
I use Posteo for mail and calendar now (theyāre not encrypted between users like Proton but you can just hook it up to any mail client and PGP your shit) .Mail is IMAPS, calendar is CalDAV, contacts are CardDAV, etc. Depending on where you fall on the security-convenience sliding scale, that might be an option. Iāve decided that I care more about portability and standards than super-thick encryption which made me choose them over Tuta, because Tuta offers no way to access the mail over IMAP whatsoever, not even an optional bridge like Proton, and that was a total dealbreaker for me. Posteo also claim theyāre 100% green energy which is a nice bonus.
For drive I use Filen.io now. Theyāre relatively new so I canāt make any assumptions about how long theyāll be around but the price is fair and they offer lifetime payments too. Also their Linux client is pretty solid and doesnāt fucking eat my RAM for breakfast. Theyāre also in the process of adding support for rclone as per a GitHub issue Iām following.
VPN I pretty much donāt use because Iāve never felt I needed it, so no recommendations there from me.
Both of these suggestions are very nice, thank you!
I was in the exact same boat til recently, but switching off of Proton was actually surprisingly easy even though I had it tied into a bunch of accounts and infrastructure. I actually ended up saving a lot of money compared with Proton Unlimited, and itās a relief to not have all my eggs in one basket, especially since stuff like Protonās no logs policy is effectively worthless, and if youāre a whistleblower or similar youāre expected to use a VPN or Tor to access your mail every time to keep from being arrestedā¦ but most likely your VPN (and possibly Tor client) is Proton too if youāre paying for it, with the same worthless no logs policy.
some quick recommendations:
tuta does both of these. their mail is e2e and fine ā itās jankier than proton but also less resource-intensive. itās also the only other choice for now :(
I havenāt used their calendar yet, but from a distance it looks good. I should give it a shot sometime soon.
this depends on what youāre using your VPN for. actual security? fucked if I know. high bandwidth fuckery? airvpn is pretty good and theyāll let you allocate ports.
tutaās getting this soon apparently. otherwise, I can second Backblaze being very reasonably priced if you donāt mind having to choose and set up your own e2e software.
Thanks for the suggestions! VPN is mostly to tell my ISP to fuck off. Tuta sounds cool but I am worried about it enshittifying as well. I am relieved to hear that switching from Proton was easy.