Embracing the GC

I never actually liked the GC in D as it didn't seem to fit in with the general direction of the language, and Walter Bright in D at 20: Hits and Misses says:

Miss: Emphasis on GC

I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)

Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.

Only issue is they’re stored in my server as belonging to the server user (I assume everything in those directories should belong to root and I can just use chown?) But I also don’t know if they retain the same permissions when backed up.

Not everything will be owned by root, and some of the binaries will be setuid or setgid, some might even have extended attributes (e.g. ping will usually have a security.capability attribute). /var will also have a lot of different owners.

"secure alternative"? Others are not secure?

Pretty much anything that's only available via an app store. The difference with web apps is that I can also use them on a laptop/PC and I have a bit more control about tracking (by using ad/tracking blockers).

not being forced to have an Android or Apple smartphone, so more open standards and just Web apps instead of proprietary apps

replaced it myself - it's not actually that difficult to do

I actually replaced the display twice already (got a replacement from Aliexpress for around $16) - first time because the touchscreen failed and second time because I smashed it.

Sony z3c with FirefoxOS and a Samsung A5 with Tizen

similar thing with requires requires { ...

and you can nest it even further: requires requires { requires ...

Governments, if they want, can decrypt any chat

Any source for that claim?

In a subpoena case in India, that turned out to be not true.

Source please.

WhatsApp admins hold keys to being able to do that under law pressure.

How do they get the keys?

They only guarantee it for 1-1 messages and statuses, and against “generic” actors for group chats…

Who is "they"?

Group chats are also end-to-end encrypted in WhatsApp (so any monitoring would need to be done in cooperation with one of the participants' devices before encryption or after decryption)

yowsup is an Open Source implementation of the WhatsApp protocol. So there is proper end-to-end encryption on the protocol level - that would only leave the possibility of having a backdoor in the "official" WhatsApp client, but none has been found so far. BTW, people do actually (try to) decompile the WhatsApp client (or the WhatsApp Web client which implements the same protocol and functionality) and look what it is doing.

For anyone really curious, it's not too difficult to hook into the WhatsApp Web client with your web browsers Javascript debugger and see what messages are sent.

I never really got used to IRC myself, but it's usually fine when connecting to IRC via Matrix.

BTW, what other communication channels would you have expected?

Did a bit more digging through the mailing list (also looking through the links posted on the HN thread), and to me it looks a bit weird.

OP came up with an initial patch (Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 12:36 PM) that wasn't deemed to be good enough to be merged. Maintainer came up with a different patch (Tue, 7 Jun 2022 00:34:56 +1000) saying "but I wanted to fix it differently". OP then posted a reworked patch (Fri Jun 10 17:15:49 AEST 2022) that looks a lot more similar to the maintainer's patch.

The maintainer's patch and OP's reworked patch look quite similar, but from what I can see from the mailing list, the maintainer actually came up with that approach, and OP didn't then credit the maintainer in his reworked patch. @kairos@programming.dev can you please clarify, what am I missing?

I am not really seeing any toxic behaviour here.

OP's patch was largely based on code in ptrace32.c, but that code actually looks quite bad. So maintainer applied a better fix. Maybe ptrace32.c should be updated to use code that's more similar to ptrace-fpu.c now?

So you have just re-posted an old email to the mailing list just so you can link to it, likely confusing everyone on that mailing list.

and newer versions won’t run due to library dependencies.

Mozilla seem to be able to limit library dependencies in their builds: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/system-requirements/

But are they actually doing this? I am not seeing any changes: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa still has the .deb packages