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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • I’ve been using pcloud. They do one time upfront payments for ‘lifetime’ cloud storage. Catch a sale and it’s ~$160/TB. For something long term like backups it seems unbeatable. To the point I sort of don’t expect them to actually last forever, but if they last 2-3 years it’s a decent deal still.

    Use rclone to upload my files, honestly not ideal though since it’s meant for file synchronisation not backups. Also they are dog slow. Downloading my 4TBs takes ~10 days.



  • I don’t get the term ‘technical debt’. Most people seem to use it to say “We took shortcuts previously, so now we need to go back and do things properly”.

    FIrst, it’s a bad metaphor. You take on debt to invest in long term things that will provide future benefits. Telling the bean counters that you need to stop working on useful features to ‘pay back technical debt’ is not making things clearer to them.

    Second, you write software, what the heck are you talking about? Compare to civil engineering. If an area gets busier and the existing narrow wood bridge is no longer suitible, engineers don’t say “Wow what idiots built this road with no eye to future growth?” It was built with the needs and resources of the time. To improve it, the bridge needs to be closed, demolished, and rebuilt with planning, labour and materials.

    Instead software is empherial. You don’t need to demolish what’s there. No need to build temporary alternative infrastructure. No need for new materials and disposal of the old. It’s just planning and labour to redo a piece of software. It always seems so whiny when people complain about technical debt, as if switching to a different build system is anywhere close to the difficulty of fixing real life; replacing lead pipes with copper for an entire city, or removing asbestos from buildings.


  • My partner worked for a local council. They reset your password every 90 days which prevented you from logging in via the VPN remotely. To fix it you’d call IT and they’ll demand you tell them your current password and new password so they can change it themselves on your behalf.

    Even worse, requesting a work iphone meant filling out an IT support ticket. So that IT could set up your phone for you, the ticket demanded your work domain username and password, along with your personal apple account username and password.


  • It was meant in jest, I should have contrasted plain text / cipher text to be more clear. Though it’s a similar kind of extenstion to email technology that they are advocating against.

    These folks want to read their emails in their terminal email client, and for you to cater to their limitations. If you use tuta and send them an email, tuta just emails them a link to view the message on tuta’s webapp. I’d say this anti-HTML group aren’t fans of that.

    Not to argue semantics, but I would consider encryption in general is a change in message formatting. The client needs to change how the bytes are interpreted. It adds complexity, and clients may not support it, their exact arguments against HTML.