TechTakes @awful.systems BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems 2w ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024

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 you’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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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

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Y'all, 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:

Proton Mail

Proton VPN

Proton Drive

Proton Calendar

and I'd be forced to reassess my password manager if hadn't 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 "Chatbot will look at the contents of your Drive and tell you which authorities to surrender yourself to"?
- 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 that’s a bit trickier but I’ve been happy using mullvad… they’re 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 paper… you don’t 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 Mullvad's website and it's really quite awesome. Everything about their service has a "we want to make this accessible to everyone" 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.
- last time it came up, tuta was the least worst of the mail options. it's not the same offering as proton's 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 don't have a direct recommendation in part because [0] and in part because I don't 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 haven't 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] - I'm 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. haven't used myself.
  
  [2] - also haven't used it myself, comes from some of the folks of the TPB gang
  
  [3] - admittedly I haven't tried that hard because I don't need it much, but it is extremely goddamn annoying to debug from clients
- also, how are you liking bitwarden?
  
  I really need to kill off my current password manager and bitwarden's 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]
  
  it's gotten so bad that I've started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me
  
  [0] - no global hotkeys? the fuck
  
  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 it’s working solid.
  
  alas: my main workstation is (non-slate) macos, and it's unchangeable for the foreseeable future
  
  good to know those (already) exist as options, though. if I can find some spoons I'll try look around and see if there's maybe something similar I can hack up/agglutinate from what's around
  
  Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway
  
  I haven't even tried it yet because I'm real "ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh" about even the idea of a js-/ts-based gui client for my password manager. largely because I've met too many js/ts devs and I outright don't trust their competence and processes. so your post is definite motivation for me to eyeball some of the other clients too
  
  also, how are you liking bitwarden?
  
  I am happy with it. That they only charge $10 a year for services I don'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.
  
  it’s gotten so bad that I’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 I'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 ∞ is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode. So I am only theoretically up to the task, which is ... IDK maybe I should start grifting?
  
  But for real, I have considered writing my own:
  
  VPN client where we don'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 don'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. "Oh no you gotta edit the Kanshi config for that one." It's tedious to remember where various programs look for the config and whatever particular syntax is chosen (isn't this fucking solved with toml files already?)
  
  An Android reminder app that isn'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.
  
  I am in the same boat, except all of the software I’ve ever written has been TeX
  
  I'm sorry
  
  giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why ∞ is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode
  
  that sound you can hear is my despairing screaming[0]
  
  VPN client where ... 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.io's integration to that). I think there's long context here, and if you buy me a beer I could rant in detail
  
  PS: There is Goldwarden
  
  oh good, it'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 "yeah gpg is fine"), crdt sync, a sane fucking language to build everything on, own-devices friendly (in the "you can sync device to device peer-wise" sense, vs the "there's a remote server broker" sense), and pretty okay(tm) interfaces for client building/extensibility
  
  I’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
  
  GPUs: not even once
  
  That is a good rule. The GPU programmers seem to think this is good code and that it'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 don't show up in fortran
- I use Posteo for mail and calendar now (they’re 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. I’ve 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 they’re 100% green energy which is a nice bonus.
  
  For drive I use Filen.io now. They’re relatively new so I can’t make any assumptions about how long they’ll be around but the price is fair and they offer lifetime payments too. Also their Linux client is pretty solid and doesn’t fucking eat my RAM for breakfast. They’re also in the process of adding support for rclone as per a GitHub issue I’m following.
  
  VPN I pretty much don’t use because I’ve 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 it’s a relief to not have all my eggs in one basket, especially since stuff like Proton’s no logs policy is effectively worthless, and if you’re a whistleblower or similar you’re expected to use a VPN or Tor to access your mail every time to keep from being arrested… but most likely your VPN (and possibly Tor client) is Proton too if you’re paying for it, with the same worthless no logs policy.
  
  some quick recommendations:
  
  Proton Mail
  
  Proton Calendar
  
  tuta does both of these. their mail is e2e and fine — it’s jankier than proton but also less resource-intensive. it’s also the only other choice for now :(
  
  I haven’t used their calendar yet, but from a distance it looks good. I should give it a shot sometime soon.
  
  Proton VPN
  
  this depends on what you’re using your VPN for. actual security? fucked if I know. high bandwidth fuckery? airvpn is pretty good and they’ll let you allocate ports.
  
  Proton Drive
  
  tuta’s getting this soon apparently. otherwise, I can second Backblaze being very reasonably priced if you don’t 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.

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