noble_pleb's recent activity

  1. 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?

    2 votes

  2. 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

  3. The ideal backend language to write web apps in 2023?

    ~comp Ask (survey)
    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?

    12 votes

  4. 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

  5. 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

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

    ~tech Ask
    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?

    11 votes

  7. 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

  8. 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

  9. Where do you see the future of IT going?

    ~tech Ask (survey)
    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

  10. 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

  11. Comment on Easiest dal recipe for the lazy cook in ~food

    noble_pleb
    Link Parent
    It depends on some factors like the build and size of your cooker, type of lentils used, etc. Most typical pressure cookers will just do a short and quick whistle lasting 3-5 seconds. But if the...

    It depends on some factors like the build and size of your cooker, type of lentils used, etc. Most typical pressure cookers will just do a short and quick whistle lasting 3-5 seconds.

    But if the cooker is too large or you've added too much water, I've noticed that they just keep on whistling continuously (like the old steam engines!). If that happens, you must switch off the gas knob immediately.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Easiest dal recipe for the lazy cook in ~food

    noble_pleb
    Link Parent
    You can also enhance this by having it with some curds and/or pickle, curds is an especially good addendum during summer. Finally, adding a small pinch of turmeric to the mix also gives you...

    With a little extra time, have a side dish with some veggies to balance out the excessively tan nature of the dish, especially if you serve it with rice.

    You can also enhance this by having it with some curds and/or pickle, curds is an especially good addendum during summer. Finally, adding a small pinch of turmeric to the mix also gives you additional health benefits like antioxidants along with the dal protein!

    3 votes

  14. Comment on I've (mostly) left reddit. It's a lot like quitting cigarettes. in ~talk

    noble_pleb
    Link
    Reddit was very much usable and decent until around ~2014-15, it was pretty much what tildes is right now behavior wise. Somewhere around 2016 vested interests started creeping in (Pao controversy...

    Reddit was very much usable and decent until around ~2014-15, it was pretty much what tildes is right now behavior wise. Somewhere around 2016 vested interests started creeping in (Pao controversy if I recall correctly?) and things started getting worse.

    Technology is rapidly evolving and social media is still in it's infancy (we have barely even stepped into the digital age considering the span of human history!). I'm sure the folks will figure a way out and make the net a better place within a decade or so.

    2 votes

  15. Rant of a childish mind wandering the nebulous realms filled with abstractness and nothingness, proceed with caution!

    ~talk Text 584 words
    Hello Folks, I haven't posted on Tildes for a while and today I have a very strong feeling to post something. But what exactly should I post about? In some sense, a writer's block is the exact...

    Hello Folks,

    I haven't posted on Tildes for a while and today I have a very strong feeling to post something.

    But what exactly should I post about? In some sense, a writer's block is the exact anti-thesis of a child. Coming up with some creative content is sometimes painfully difficult for a functioning adult like me, while my 10 year old nephew can blabber hundreds of different things in a five minute span!

    Now obviously, I can also come up with hundreds of different things but we all know it's not so easy to put down those things on the keyboard. I'm not an expert in writing craft but I have a strong feeling that most of us just hold ourselves back out of fear of what the world says. And honestly, the so called "world" here is acting very toxic and isn't helping by discouraging content creators who aren't always top notch. And sometimes, the content itself can be good or bad just as beauty is defined by the eye of the beholder. What is cringe for you may be good content or even humor for someone else. If only most of us start focusing on the "full half" of the cup instead of the "empty half", think just how beautiful this world will be!

    Years of facing such toxic behavior on platforms like reddit and twitter has caused me to over-analyze and over-scrutinize everything before saying it. Any idea or concept has to pass through a lot of "mind filters" in order for them to get the "clean chit" for "yeah, this can be published". Perhaps, this particular post I'm writing is an exception or anomaly in that sense!

    As a programmer, freelancer, writer, someone interested in things like humanities and social sciences, and an ordinary Indian dude, you guys tell me what kind of content should I write so that the writer in me thrives and also the content is at least bearable by the audience?

    The problem I'm trying to solve here is difficult but I may not be the only one going through this phase. Is there a solution to this? Any proven and practical solution which you've had success with yourself?

    A part of me thinks that I should try podcasting or youtubing first, and then I'll gain the confidence necessary to actually write mind-blowing content. But I have a problem with impromptu speaking and talking, is that a very common problem? Is there an easy fix available for that? I intuitively know from what I've observed in this world that most people have enough confidence to say or speak a lot of things (even the harshest of things!) right in front of others' face but when it comes to writing, they can't write so much. I'm a kind of antithesis of that, isn't it?

    How exactly does one build confidence with public speaking? They say keep practicing and you'll get there. Here is a feeble attempt, not exactly a podcast but something near enough - a presentation for an app idea I've got. I want to create more of these but again, what content? I've got no ideas, especially interesting or appealing ones. And judging by the number of likes that youtube video got, I already have half a mind of just giving up on this!

    If you've reached until this point, thank you for sticking with me till the end. And apologies if I picked up on your brain beyond its limits!

    5 votes

  16. Comment on Google lawyer warns internet will be “a horror show” if it loses landmark Supreme Court case in ~tech

    noble_pleb
    Link
    This commenter puts it well:

    This commenter puts it well:

    Google can simply stop “recommending” (pushing) videos. People can subscribe to channels or search for content they want. As it used to be. Now Google won’t show you videos from channels you are subscribed to, will serve you different search results than what your prompt was and will push Shorts on you whether you want it or not. They chose so-called “trending” videos. I hope they lose. If they are going to push content on people, yes, they are responsible. They are making a choice of what to push. Algorithms are programmed and fed. They are not random.

    4 votes

  17. Google Adsense is bringing a bunch of policy changes that affect how your sites are monetized

    ~tech Text 164 words
    Yesterday, Adsense support sent an email to their users regarding their upcoming policy changes. This primarily affects how subdomains are monetized. Going forward, your subdomains inside the...

    Yesterday, Adsense support sent an email to their users regarding their upcoming policy changes. This primarily affects how subdomains are monetized. Going forward, your subdomains inside the primary domains in the "Sites" section (www, etc.) won't be allowed, any existing ones will be removed and their rules will be merged with the primary domain (such as example.com).

    Furthermore, what constitutes a "Site" will also change henceforth. You can only add a primary domain (such as example.com) and the subdomains which are listed on the public suffix list (such as github.io, blogspot.com, etc.). Thus, your own subdomains (such as xyz.example.com or www.example.com) won't be allowed in Adsense.

    I don't know what they will achieve by doing this considering they already vet and audit each site before approving them for adsense? In any case, other alternatives to Adsense exist such as Propeller Ads, CJ Affiliate, etc. for those affected by this move but I don't know their efficacy.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on How a shipping error 100 years ago launched the $30 billion chicken industry in ~food

    noble_pleb
    Link
    For someone too lazy to open that link, what's the tldr of that error?

    For someone too lazy to open that link, what's the tldr of that error?

  19. Comment on Does anyone actually like canned beans? in ~food

    noble_pleb
    Link
    The history of canned food goes back to merchant navies and adventurous sea voyages in the yonder times when they had to survive many days across long distances. So you have to look at canned food...

    The history of canned food goes back to merchant navies and adventurous sea voyages in the yonder times when they had to survive many days across long distances. So you have to look at canned food from survival perspective, not the taste or carnal fulfillment perspectives! In any case, I think the flavored varieties of canned beans (like baked, etc.) are the ones which are more popular than unflavored, especially with brands like Heinz I think.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive in ~books

    noble_pleb
    Link
    The people who spent money on this rewriting could have made a much better contribution to humanity by feeding some poor or donating to a cause by using that money. That's all I have to say.

    The people who spent money on this rewriting could have made a much better contribution to humanity by feeding some poor or donating to a cause by using that money. That's all I have to say.

    8 votes