noble_pleb's recent activity

  1. Comment on Tildes and identity politics in ~tildes

    noble_pleb
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    You're absolutely right on this. Whoever is "modding" or "adminning" tildes seems to be doing a great job of filtering the content and ensuring that only the right candidates get the call to join....

    You're absolutely right on this. Whoever is "modding" or "adminning" tildes seems to be doing a great job of filtering the content and ensuring that only the right candidates get the call to join. Keep up the great work everyone, let identity politics never bring its woefully ugly thorns into these realms!

    Having said that, IMHO identity politics ain't the only thorn that afflicts a social network these days. There are many others such as:

    Corporate/Brand Trolling: This is very typical of reddit. Whenever something critical is being said about a brand or business, God knows where these defensive trolls come from all of a sudden and start downvoting and trolling everyone who speak against their favorite brand. This is probably linked to identity politics too as corporate brands have also become strong collective identities of sorts today.

    Political Trolling: Again, very much intertwined with identity politics is a political ideology. Sometimes, it's not about an identity but something else such as a favorite narrative or political ideology a troll gets butt hurt about, and then starts vandalizing all discussion in a thread or sub.

    Toxic Trolling: Some handles seem to be just toxic for no apparent reason. Maybe they had a bad day or a bad breakfast in the morning?

    The job of a moderator is to identify these agents causing nuisance in a discussion group and failure to do so leaves a very bad impression among the members and causes them to search migratory options somewhere else.

    2 votes
  2. Comment on Deep thoughts on tattoos and tattooing culture in ~hobbies

    noble_pleb
    Link
    I'm not much aware about tattoo culture to be honest, is it an art form kinda thing? Like artists and sculptors love painting and making idols, programmers love their recursive loops and if...

    I'm not much aware about tattoo culture to be honest, is it an art form kinda thing? Like artists and sculptors love painting and making idols, programmers love their recursive loops and if conditions, similarly people find artistic happiness in decorating their bodies with tattoos? This has remarkable parallels in pagan culture, perhaps even medieval art if you think about it.

    I've seen some people in love engraving tattoos of their partner's name on their body. Like the first letter, etc. with a love symbol. It's an expression of serious commitment and a trust building exercise, isn't it? Since the tattoo is permanent, you gotta live with it forever now!

    2 votes
  3. Comment on How to move on after a relationship? in ~life

    noble_pleb
    Link
    Inability to trust other humans is quite a huge emotive issue many in the present times are dealing with. It's quite natural to feel not being able to trust in today's world, there has been just...

    I tried finding new friends, but I can't really read people and seem to misinterpret everything.

    Inability to trust other humans is quite a huge emotive issue many in the present times are dealing with. It's quite natural to feel not being able to trust in today's world, there has been just so much cynicism and bad things in the last 1-2 decades or so.

    But somehow, you need to bring back that ability to trust and be trusted. And there is absolutely no doubt that you can do it because you've already done it in your childhood. None of us were born like that. As a child grows up, it starts losing that ability due to the situations and people life throws at it. And once lost, it's very difficult to gain back that ability. But dude, you've got to somehow bring it back. It's just like quitting cigarette or tobacco by remembering how cool were the days when we didn't smoke and had that will or control over mind.

    And yeah, don't that that particular "dog" woman seriously, there are million other females in this world.

    4 votes
  4. Comment on Distrohoppers, what's your flavor this week? in ~comp

    noble_pleb
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    The Windows versions peaked out at Windows 7 SP1. That's the best Windows innovation so far, the perfect and minimal OS which has everything you need to run your applications but no bloat, plus...

    The Windows versions peaked out at Windows 7 SP1. That's the best Windows innovation so far, the perfect and minimal OS which has everything you need to run your applications but no bloat, plus you can turn off forced updates and telemetry!

    You can't believe the number of Facebook fans who are still running these support groups to help each other with issues on Windows 7. But I guess it won't last long, at some point Microsoft will make it just too difficult for new software to run on that old OS. Hence, Linux Mint is my ideal choice of OS today which is pretty similar to Windows 7 in attitudes and minimalism!

    2 votes
  5. Comment on Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps in ~tech

    noble_pleb
    Link
    Those third party app owners can actually turn this situation into an opportunity you know. Although Reddit is a popular social network, these apps are clearly using Reddit only as a backend...

    Those third party app owners can actually turn this situation into an opportunity you know.

    Although Reddit is a popular social network, these apps are clearly using Reddit only as a backend database, albeit one which is shared by many other posters due to it's huge popularity. They should take this opportunity to build their own backend APIs instead. Until that happens, they can use one of the open source old reddit clones like Saidit and point their APIs there? A more ideal thing that could happen is that all the third party app devs come together and pool resources for hosting this backend API! That way, they get the benefits of both scaling of economies, and an increased combined userbase.

    2 votes
  6. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tildes

    noble_pleb
    Link
    There could be many things that some individuals here may not be liking about tildes but what I feel is that it's much better than most competitors out there, both in terms of quality of content...

    There could be many things that some individuals here may not be liking about tildes but what I feel is that it's much better than most competitors out there, both in terms of quality of content which is posted here and in terms of minimalism of the UX. Whatever the site admins are doing with tildes, they're doing it right 👍

    7 votes
  7. Comment on Japan will put a wooden satellite into orbit next year in ~space

    noble_pleb
    Link Parent
    When meteor hits an object, it creates friction. Doesn't that friction result in a fire or some damage at the very least?

    When meteor hits an object, it creates friction. Doesn't that friction result in a fire or some damage at the very least?

    1 vote
  8. Comment on Japan will put a wooden satellite into orbit next year in ~space

    noble_pleb
    Link Parent
    There is also the case that wood is relatively delicate and more vulnerable to harsh natural forces compared to hard metal. What if a stray meteor or space dust hits this satellite? Isn't the...

    There is also the case that wood is relatively delicate and more vulnerable to harsh natural forces compared to hard metal. What if a stray meteor or space dust hits this satellite? Isn't the wooden material more prone to catch fire or get damaged in these cases?

  9. Comment on Linux mini computers in ~comp

    noble_pleb
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    One of the biggest obstacles for self hosting at home or garage isn't Linux but the fact that most ISPs lock you behind a CG-NAT or something, your machine's IP isn't even accessible from the...

    One of the biggest obstacles for self hosting at home or garage isn't Linux but the fact that most ISPs lock you behind a CG-NAT or something, your machine's IP isn't even accessible from the outside cloud. How do you get around that?

    3 votes
  10. Comment on "Kraft Singles, the standard for American cheese, cannot legally be called American cheese, or even 'cheese food.'" in ~food

    noble_pleb
    Link
    What is the context here? Why would the company or stakeholders mind terribly or have an issue if people called in "American Cheese"?

    What is the context here? Why would the company or stakeholders mind terribly or have an issue if people called in "American Cheese"?

    1 vote
  11. The ideal backend language to write web apps in 2023?

    I know quite a controversial and opinionated question, one that might easily get blasted with downvotes on a site like StackOverflow or even Reddit! Nevertheless, one which I believe is still...

    I know quite a controversial and opinionated question, one that might easily get blasted with downvotes on a site like StackOverflow or even Reddit! Nevertheless, one which I believe is still relevant to ask and useful one even in 2023.

    The problem with backend web technologies is that we are overwhelmed with choices. Whilst getting spoilt with choices seems like a useful thing sometimes, it might easily be an impediment in decision making too. Based on my experience, there are a bunch of useful stacks and I will work on any of them if you pay me to work as a freelance coder. Each has its own pros and cons but I'm yet to find the ideal one which according to me is something that should be easy to code and deploy while also better performing at the same time.

    • ASP.NET: C# is the language I started coding web apps with in my last company and ASP.NET web forms was quite the rage back then. PHP was also gaining traction in the open source world and the webdev was mostly divided between the Enterprisey .NET aristocrats of Microsoft world and the poor PHP peasants of the FOSS world! One good thing about ASP.NET was performance. Since MS controlled the whole stack, they also put great efforts at making it work faster. The bad thing, of course, was dependence on a closed tech stack and a closed black box that generated JS functionality on its own.
    • PHP: When I resigned from that company and started freelancing, I came to know about open source, linux, XAMPP, etc. That was when I realized that my own attitudes and thinking was more attuned to the FOSS peasant mindset than the wealthy aristocrat's! I didn't earn quite as much in freelancing with WP, Drupal, SuiteCRM, CodeIgniter, etc. but I found great happiness and contentment in being part of the open source process. Till date, PHP remains my favorite language for backend development and most of my web projects involve CodeIgniter or even pure PHP.
    • Python: Flask is what got me interested in Python web development. The sheer minimalism and flexibility of that framework is what I found quite remarkable and quite a rarity in the frameworks world. And jinja2 template system was just fantastic. The other framework called django is more popular I think and I've worked on that too but Flask still remains my favorite. Flask is good in performance dept. too but I think it gets tricky once you start scaling with too many users.
    • Java: I've never really bothered with Java web development except a few tutorial experiments on the Apache TomEE server. The multi-layered approach that Java takes not only has very steep learning curve but unless you're a very gifted programmer, it's practically impossible to beat the performance of interpreted PHP/Flask!
    • NodeJS: Again, not much work here except brief hobby projects like http-live-simulator. The npm packaging system really turned me off initially with so many packages and issues with that system in the earlier days. Nowadays, I've heard that it's much usable but I've never gotten into it.

    And now, we also have the evolving languages like Golang, Rust, etc. taking their baby steps towards web development too! Are any of them worth giving a try? If someone were to ask you for a backend tech stack recommendation while giving equal weightage to performance, developer productivity and ease of deployment, which one will you suggest?

    23 votes
  12. Comment on Reddit is going to enforce rate-limiting the API's free tier as well as charging for higher rates in ~tech

    noble_pleb
    Link
    From what I recall, the CEO change that happened in circa ~2016 (Pao or something I guess) was when things started going downwards. Reddit ceased to be a community and started becoming an ad...

    From what I recall, the CEO change that happened in circa ~2016 (Pao or something I guess) was when things started going downwards. Reddit ceased to be a community and started becoming an ad revenue capitalist machine from then on. This is what the attitude of new management seems and unless some drastic change happens at top, I don't see Reddit becoming any good.

    2 votes
  13. Comment on Among the three major operating systems, which one cares the most about their user's privacy? in ~tech

    noble_pleb
    Link Parent
    Thanks for your insights. I do care a lot about privacy but I'm also pragmatic and know the limitations of how deep one can get into technology. Building your own OS from scratch requires sound...

    Thanks for your insights. I do care a lot about privacy but I'm also pragmatic and know the limitations of how deep one can get into technology. Building your own OS from scratch requires sound knowledge of computing internals like disk partitioning and fragmenting, bootstrapping a program or OS, memory management, etc. and while I've studied these concepts during my college days, never practically done anything beyond little experiments. I've never even installed Arch Linux yet after looking at its lengthy process!

    A Windows OS is fine with me, I started my career with a computer course that taught Foxpro 2.6 running on a Windows 3.11 PC! It's just that the world has changed a lot today and these tech companies have become way more aware about data collection than we have become aware about personal data privacy and security!

    1 vote
  14. Among the three major operating systems, which one cares the most about their user's privacy?

    Here are my views on this: Windows: The Windows attitude towards privacy isn't good with their telemetry and other data collection increasing gradually from 8 to 10 to 11. In fact, most geeks...

    Here are my views on this:

    • Windows: The Windows attitude towards privacy isn't good with their telemetry and other data collection increasing gradually from 8 to 10 to 11. In fact, most geeks across the support forums think that 7 is probably the safest and most privacy friendly Windows version but MS is doing everything it can to ensure that newer software doesn't support 7 and it just goes into obsolescence.

      The "default" state in which a W10/11 laptop comes today is so privacy unfriendly that it sends all kinds of data like contacts, location, etc. to Microsoft and their "trusted partners". You can't turn off this data unless you've visited power user forums and know exactly where to find those settings, and basic telemetry still won't be disabled of course.

      As ironic and unintuitive as it sounds, Microsoft Windows was probably much better in privacy department during the bad old days of Gates and Ballmer compared to the good "open source and geek friendly" days of Satya Nadella!

    • Mac: Apple systems should ideally be privacy friendly considering the amount of premium they charge to their products and services. But how well does that work in practice? I've never used an Apple product but those who use them seem to have the impression that they're no good in this department compared to others.
      Logic tells me that a more capitalist devil should be no different than the less capitalist one, they're probably all the same when it comes to throwing user's privacy in the bin!

    • Linux: Linux used to be the holy grail of users who cared about privacy many years ago but does that still hold good today? Ubuntu was also in some data collection controversy or other many times in past, but how are the state of things today? And what about the derivative distros, are they good too?

    13 votes
  15. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    noble_pleb
    Link
    Classic Sudoku! I'm a freelance web developer on Upwork and interestingly, got a project from a client who required building of a Sudoku app. I had to learn about the math and how the game works...

    Classic Sudoku!

    I'm a freelance web developer on Upwork and interestingly, got a project from a client who required building of a Sudoku app. I had to learn about the math and how the game works along with all its variations. This got me pretty much addicted to the game itself!

    4 votes
  16. Comment on Where do you see the future of IT going? in ~tech

    noble_pleb
    Link Parent
    Only issue with C/CPP is that you need to write tons of code to do a small arithmetic or logical op, and when things like pointers get involved, the average human is bound to feel terrified! Maybe...

    Only issue with C/CPP is that you need to write tons of code to do a small arithmetic or logical op, and when things like pointers get involved, the average human is bound to feel terrified! Maybe Python is a neat example here, not only does it work at a higher level but has an ecosystem of libraries around it for almost anything you can dream of. And indeed, power users are definitely using python more and more for their daily IT work, it's no longer just programmer's language as of today.

    1 vote
  17. Where do you see the future of IT going?

    So, what's the hottest new thing in IT today, what's that coolest new tech which might prove to be a goldmine some years down the line? The way PCs, websites, databases, programming languages,...

    So, what's the hottest new thing in IT today, what's that coolest new tech which might prove to be a goldmine some years down the line? The way PCs, websites, databases, programming languages, etc. used to be in the 90s or mobile computing used to be in 00s? Early 00s gave us many a goodies in terms of open source innovations, be it Web Technologies, Linux advancement and propagation through the masses or FOSS software like Wordpress and Drupal, or even the general attitude and awareness about FOSS. Bitcoin also deserves a notable mention here, whether you love it or hate it.

    But today, I think IT no longer has that spark it once had. People keep mulling around AI, ML and Data Science but these are still decades old concepts, and whatever number crunching or coding the engineers are doing somehow doesn't seem to reach the masses? People get so enthusiastic about ChatGPT, but at the end of the day it's just another software like a zillion others. I deem it at par with something like Wordpress, probably even lesser. I'm yet to see any major adoption or industry usage for it.

    Is it the case that IT has reached some kind of saturation point? Everything that could have been innovated, at least the low hanging fruits, has already been innovated? What do you think about this?

    13 votes
  18. Comment on Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025 in ~tech

    noble_pleb
    Link
    Windows 7 was when excellence in windows development peaked out . What came afterwards was just advertising and narrative.

    Windows 7 was when excellence in windows development peaked out . What came afterwards was just advertising and narrative.

    4 votes