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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • The prices for tech on Taobao in China and in the US are nearly identical for the vast majority of tech items. So much is excluded from the tariffs that it’s silly they even exist on paper. There are indeed some newer items only available there, but they’re rarely on the affordable end of pricing.

    Laptops and computer hardware in particular surprise me. I was hoping to get a new Huawei or Xiaomi laptop the last time I was in China since I got my parents a Huawei I’ve been jealous of in the US several years before they were banned. Absolutely nothing I could find on Taobao or in store was comparable value even to computers from Dell/HP/Lenovo.


  • I can’t say I’ve had a great time with audio in either personally, though it’s indeed much easier to fix audio problems in Linux. But just yesterday pipewire must have hung or crashed preventing all browser based video playback entirely, which due to the symptoms not appearing audio related was quite annoying to debug. I still have no idea what caused it in order to avoid it happening again in the future.


  • Depending on how you use your phone this concern may not be as big as you think, flip phones spend the vast majority of time with the screen closed and protected. My partner got a 2024 Razr and has been using it daily for 1.5yr without any scratches or other screen related issues (there’s some expected slowness from the clunky MTK processor of course). I was skeptical of the durability at the time but for $450 with an 18mo warranty including accidental damage figured it was worth the risk. The technology is much more mature than I realized.



  • These attacks are more around the encryption and all require a fully malicious server. It sounds like Bitwarden is taking these seriously and personally I’d still strongly prefer it to any closed source solution where there could be many more unknown but undiscovered security concerns.

    Using a local solution is always most secure, but imo you should first ask yourself if you trust your own security practices and whether you have sufficient hardware redundancy to be actually better. I managed to lose the private key to some Bitcoin about a decade ago due to trying to be clever with encryption and local redundant copies.

    Further, with the prevalence of 2FA even if their server was somehow fully compromised as long as you use a different authenticator app than Bitwarden you’re not at major risk anyways. With how poorly the average person manages their password security this hurdle alone is likely enough to stop all but attacks targeted specifically at you as an individual.



  • Snaps bundle dependencies and sandbox applications. The dependencies aspect is what matters more to me, but apparently there’s also security benefits if you were to try to install a malicious program.

    You can remove snapd, doing so also removes a number of built in apps. But at that point you may start questioning why you’re not just using Debian stable and add the stuff you want. Both of these options pretty much defeat the point of what Ubuntu was.



  • I get what Canonical was going for with snaps but wow did they ever ruin Ubuntu’s reputation. It used to be the clear choice for anyone who wanted a generic Linux where you don’t have to configure everything yourself. Sure some people didn’t like Unity but the core distro still worked well and was stable. With snaps, package management has become more complex than other distros while decreasing performance if memory limited (and who isn’t nowadays). The number of times I’ve had something not work in the “stable” snap package is far too many, and it’s pretty much always fixed by installing the same package with apt.

    I get the reasoning for sandboxing applications, but they needed to wait until it was more stable to make the default. At this rate I doubt we’re ever going to get a truly mainstream desktop Linux distro rivaling macos and Windows…



  • Every company I’ve worked at has “annual” raises for cost of living. But sadly according to management they now average 2% when throughout COVID they were closer to 5%. Further, this company has made excuses to delay the review cycle 3 of the past 5 years I’ve been there, meaning they’ve now done 4 review/raise cycles over a full 5yr period. Employees definitely work less hard now, and many have left. I was also going to leave but just got promoted (with a whole 6% raise!)… So maybe I’ll stick around another 6mo?


  • This process pretty much summarizes why I’m scared to try changing companies lately. Presumably these measures are to make sure you’re not cheating with AI, but then if you get the job they expect you to use AI.

    I like in-person interviews most, they totally resolve the trust concerns. And to other engineers interviewing you using fewer MS products is typically viewed as a good thing. But getting to the in-person part is difficult in this market even if you’re willing to put up with all their spyware from what I hear.