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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • At $DAYJOB, we’re currently setting up basically a way to bridge an interface over the internet, so it transports everything that enters on an interface across the aether. Well, and you already guessed it, I accidentally configured it for eth0 and couldn’t SSH in anymore.

    Where it becomes fun, is that I actually was at work. I was setting it up on two raspis, which were connected to a router, everything placed right next to me. So, I figured, I’d just hook up another Ethernet cable, pick out the IP from the router’s management interface and SSH in that way.
    Except I couldn’t reach the management interface anymore. Nothing in that network would respond.

    Eventually, I saw that the router’s activity lights were blinking like Christmas decoration. I’m guessing, I had built a loop and therefore something akin to a broadcast storm was overloading the router. Thankfully, the solution was then relatively straightforward, in that I had to unplug one of the raspis, SSH in via the second port, nuke our configuration and then repeat for the other raspi.



  • Well, I happen to be lucky enough that this particular project is actually developed as part of my dayjob. And the other projects, if I’m honest, are just projects I developed to scratch my own itch and then uploaded onto Codeberg with a libre license. I haven’t really announced them anywhere, except to a few colleagues, so I basically never get suggestions there.

    But yeah, this project being part of my dayjob kind of makes it even more clear-cut that I’m not going to put in extra time to develop features that no one currently sponsors…



  • Got a comment last week on one of the open-source projects I’m contributing to. We have an issue open, documenting that we’d like to support a certain feature, and this person clearly took quite a bit of time to pull together information, which gets us over the first major hurdle for this feature.

    But also, this feature is really not the highest priority to us right now. Really had to stop myself from promising that we’d look into it in my response, because it is still quite a bit of work to actually make it a reality. I’m still new to all this, so I still have to learn to not feel bad about it. If they want to scratch their own itch, they’ll have to scratch it in full. That I’d review their code before merging, is honestly already quite a bit of effort put in by me for something that I don’t care to solve right now. That I take time to respond is basic decency, but still also uses up time. Really, I had not understood before, how much work it has to be for maintainers with an actually active community.



  • Android, Chromium.

    The problem is that:

    1. Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.
    2. These projects establish platforms that have shitty decisions baked in. For example, the Android dev tooling has Google ads/tracking as one of the built-in UI components, which is why even if you patch the OS, the apps will still be shitty. To actually change this stuff, you’d need a majority of users to switch to your fork and stay there for a few years.
    3. Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.

    And so long as a fork is unlikely, Google can do shitfuckery quite similar to proprietary projects.