AnAmericanPotato

Well, I admit I'm being a little facetious.

But that fact that "normie" users have zero tolerance for friction is a real problem. If you can't do anything that's not spoonfed to you, then you are prey for corporate abuse. The only people who really care about minimizing friction are the people trying to exploit "normies" for profit. Most open-source software is built to solve problems that are more important than "how can we exploit the general population a little more effectively?"

I don't think the solution here is for every single open-source project to devote a large percentage of their time and resources to eliminating friction. That would be a huge drain on teams that have more important things to do.

Rather, the solution is for users to be willing to spend a few seconds here and there to understand what they're doing and what their options are.

less friction is better

I strongly but respectfully disagree.

Telling people not to do something with no compelling explanation will surely increase the odds of people doing that thing. Honestly, the better strategy would be to say nothing.

Electron apps are bloated in terms of disk and memory usage.

Presumably the rust version will be faster and leaner.

Ownership is a big problem with VPNs. A bunch of them are owned by the same two or three companies, and those companies are not good.

I really have no idea what to trust nowadays. A few years ago, Mullvad and Proton were the industry darlings, but they BOTH have far-right ties. Mullvad's founder donates to far-right organizations, and Proton's CEO has AI psychosis and doubled down on some ridiculous comments praising Trump.

It really boggles the mind how anyone can purportedly value privacy and also support any far-right politics. Makes me think they're all honeypots.

For mail, a few things I'd look for:

• Standard protocol compatibility (POP/IMAP/JMAP/SMTP) so you can use a client that's not controlled by the service provider.

• Easy E2EE setup with PGP/GPG.

• Custom domain support.

• Email alias support (though this can be done with a third-party service, potentially).

• Server-side filter rules for incoming mail.

Proton and Tuta, for example, fail on point #1. The E2EE promise really doesn't mean a lot when the service provider ultimately controls the client. If they control the client, they could very easily exfiltrate your keys via a backdoor. This can be mitigated with open-source clients and reproducible builds, but if you're using a web client or apps from Google/Apple stores, that's never going to be verifiable.

For VPN:

• No-logs policy.

• Independent audits.

• Port forwarding support.

• Anonymous payment options.

These are not exhaustive lists, just off the top of my head.

Who are you callin' fancy, cowboy?!

I'm offended!

:P

Well TIL.

I've been lied to all my life!

Although come to think of it, I'm still not sure the timing is the same. When you run at "low" power, is it cycles of like 1-5 seconds, or more like 15-60?

My microwave has a bunch of different modes. Most of them are a bit more complex than "run at X power for Y seconds". Like, the "defrost" or "potato" settings (yes there is a "potato" setting) will cycle the power on and off in bursts, which gives you more even defrosting and less explosive potatoes.

Generative AI or not

It must be. It looks very morged.

I could believe an AI made the template and the text was pasted in. That would explain the misaligned purple underline.

Right. You can still put that through a linter; the linter just wouldn't be concerned with human-readability.

In any case, my editor would not hardcode my display preferences, so if I open and save a document, nothing changes except what I actually changed.

I'll go a step further: formatting for human-readability is the job of the reader, not the writer. Hardcoded line breaks, spacing, etc. are never going to be a good solution because the idea is wrong from the start. This is a display issue, not a logic issue. It needs to be solved at the display end.

Use a syntax-aware editor that formats code the way you like it. Save it any goddamn way that is syntactically valid. Anyone else who opens it will see it any way the like in their own syntax-aware editor.

"But my editor doesn't do logical formatting!" Yes, because the entire world has been insane for several decades, and shitty editors are normalized. If the world had realized this 30 years ago, there wouldn't be a code editor in existence today that didn't do this properly. Demand better and better will be normalized.