mspencer712

mspencer712 , 6 days ago to Asklemmy in What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?

Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?

mspencer712 , 6 days ago to Asklemmy in What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?

What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.

. . .

Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.

(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)

mspencer712 , 16 days ago to Asklemmy in Why does everyone hate Microsoft for adding LLMs into Windows and spying on users, but not Apple?

So I’m curious . . . what reference am I missing that helps me understand what menu settings cause exactly which pieces of personal data to be shared with which Apple services? I want to RTFM, and while I appreciate people wanting to be helpful, comment replies are not themselves documentation.

(I switched from Android to ios in 2020 and haven’t really figured out details beyond turning icloud sync off for specific apps. I’d like to add more devices and learn to trust that sync method but I don’t understand where crypto is used and how the keys are handled.)

mspencer712 , 16 days ago to World News in Chinese #MeToo journalist jailed for five years

I still miss Naomi Wu’s tech videos.

mspencer712 , 17 days ago to Technology in 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

mspencer712 , 19 days ago to Technology in Raspberry Pi is now a public company

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

mspencer712 , 23 days ago to Experienced Devs in What's your approach for understanding a big codebase?

Start early in the commit history, see if you can understand the general shapes and concepts the project was using at the start.

Then sort of binary-search your way forward in different sized jumps and see how quickly you can get to present day without sacrificing your sanity. Completely at least.

mspencer712 , 3 months ago to Asklemmy in Is there an app that could send me a notification every 30 minutes?

I use Due on iOS for repeating timers/reminders where I need it to be persistent and annoying because the task is important. Like paying rent, or physical therapy “homework” I kept forgetting. The persistence might be good if you’re worried you’ll just dismiss a normal alarm or forget to start the next timer.

mspencer712 , 5 months ago to netsec in As if you needed another reason not to ever use SSO to your Google account for anything

My account uses 2FA and my browser remembers my password. If I get a sign in prompt but my browser doesn’t / won’t auto fill my password, I assume it knows something I don’t and I’m immediately suspicious.

Your scenario is absolutely valid and would probably catch a lot of people who don’t think about security.