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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Ditto on the no text part. That is an accessibility failure that’s way too widespread.
    Sometimes I’m afraid to even push a button: does this delete my thing, or does it do some other irreversible change? Will I be able to tell what it did? Maybe it does something completely different, or maybe I’m lucky and it does in fact perform the action I’m looking for and which in my mind is a no-brainer to include?

    And it’s infected interpersonal communication too - people peppering their messages with emojis, even professional communications. It not only looks goofy, but is either redundant (when people just add the emoji together with the word it’s meant to represent - such a bizarre practice) or, worse, ambiguous when the pictogram replaces the word and the recipient(s) can’t make out what it depicts.
    The most fun is when it’s a mix - the message contains some emojis with accompanying translation, some without.


  • I don’t share the hate for flat design.
    It’s cleaner than the others, simpler and less distracting. Easier on the eyes, too. It takes itself seriously and does so successfully imo (nice try, aero). It feels professional in a way all the previous eras don’t - they seem almost child-like by comparison.

    Modern design cultivates recognizable interactions by following conventions and common design language instead of goofy icons and high contrast colors. To me, modern software interfaces look like tools; the further you go back in time, the more they look like toys.

    Old designs can be charming if executed well and in the right context. But I’m glad most things don’t look like they did 30 years ago.

    I’m guessing many people associate older designs with the era they belonged to and the internet culture at the time. Perhaps rosy memories of younger days. Contrasting that with the overbearing corporate atmosphere of today and a general sense of a lack of authenticity in digital spaces everywhere, it’s not unreasonable to see flat design as sterile and soulless. But to me it just looks sleek and efficient.
    I used to spend hours trying to customize UIs to my liking, nowadays pretty much everything just looks good out of the box.

    The one major gripe I have is with the tendency of modern designs to hide interactions behind deeply nested menu hopping. That one feels like an over-correction from the excessively cluttered menus of the past.
    That and the fact that there’s way too many “settings” sections and you can never figure out which one has the thing you’re looking for.

    P S. The picture did flat design dirty by putting it on white background - we’re living in the era of dark mode!



  • The main difference is that 1Password requires two pieces of information for decrypting your passwords while Bitwarden requires only one.

    Requiring an additional secret in the form of a decryption key has both upsides and downsides:

    • if someone somehow gets access to your master password, they won’t be able to decrypt your passwords unless they also got access to your secret key (or one of your trusted devices)
    • a weak master password doesn’t automatically make you vulnerable
    • if you lose access to your secret key, your passwords are not recoverable
    • additional effort to properly secure your key

    So whether you want both or only password protection is a trade-off between the additional protection the key offers and the increased complexity of adequately securing it.

    Your proposed scenarios of the master password being brute forced or the servers being hacked and your master password acquired when using Bitwarden are misleading.

    Brute forcing the master password is not feasible, unless it is weak (too short, common, or part of a breach). By default, Bitwarden protects against brute force attacks on the password itself using PBKDF2 with 600k iterations. Brute forcing AES-256 (to get into the vault without finding the master password) is not possible according to current knowledge.

    Your master password cannot be “acquired” if the Bitwarden servers are hacked.
    They store the (encrypted) symmetric key used to decrypt your vault as well as your vault (where all your passwords are stored), AES256-encrypted using said symmetric key.
    This symmetric key is itself AES256-encrypted using your master password (this is a simplification) before being sent to their servers.
    Neither your master password nor the symmetric key used to decrypt your password vault is recoverable from Bitwarden servers by anyone who doesn’t know your master password and by extension neither are the passwords stored in your encrypted vault.

    See https://bitwarden.com/help/bitwarden-security-white-paper/#overview-of-the-master-password-hashing-key-derivation-and-encryption-process for details.



  • This works as a general guideline, but sometimes you aren’t able to write the code in a way that truly self-documents.
    If you come back to a function after a month and need half an hour to understand it, you should probably add some comments explaining what was done and why it was done that way (in addition to considering if you should perhaps rewrite it entirely).
    If your code is going to be used by third parties, you almost always need more documentation than the raw code.

    Yes documentation can become obsolete. So constrain its use to cases where it actually adds clarity and commit to keeping it up to date with the evolving code.


  • Extra steps that guarantee you don’t accidentally treat an integer as if it were a string or an array and get a runtime exception.
    With generics, the compiler can prove that the thing you’re passing to that function is actually something the function can use.

    Really what you’re doing if you’re honest, is doing the compiler’s work: hmm inside this function I access this field on this parameter. Can I pass an argument of such and such type here? Lemme check if it has that field. Forgot to check? Or were mistaken? Runtime error! If you’re lucky, you caught it before production.

    Not to mention that types communicate intent. It’s no fun trying to figure out how to use a library that has bad/missing documentation. But it’s a hell of a lot easier if you don’t need to guess what type of arguments its functions can handle.


  • wols@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlMy poor RAM...
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    1 year ago

    The point is that you’re not fixing the problem, you’re just masking it (and one could even argue enabling it).

    The same way adding another 4 lane highway doesn’t fix traffic long term (increasing highway throughput leads to more people leads to more cars leads to congestion all over again) simply adding more RAM is only a temporary solution.

    Developers use the excuse of people having access to more RAM as justification to produce more and more bloated software. In 5 years you’ll likely struggle even with 32GiB, because everything uses more.
    That’s not sustainable, and it’s not necessary.


  • Yup.

    Spaces? Tabs? Don’t care, works regardless.
    Copied some code from somewhere else? No problem, 9/10 times it just works. Bonus: a smart IDE will let you quick-format the entire code to whatever style you configured at the click of a button even if it was a complete mess to begin with, as long as all the curly braces are correct.

    Also, in any decent IDE you will very rarely need to actually count curly braces, it finds the pair for you, and even lets you easily navigate between them.

    The inconsistent way that whitespace is handled across applications makes interacting with code outside your own code files incredibly finicky when your language cares so much about the layout.

    There’s an argument to be made for the simplicity of python-style indentation and for its aesthetic merits, but IMO that’s outweighed by the practical inconvenience it brings.




  • wols@lemm.eetolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldExpert
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    1 year ago

    Oh neat, a real whoosh in the wild, on Lemmy!

    On a more serious note, vim is one of the most initially unintuitive commonly used pieces of software I’ve encountered.

    Sure, if you put in a little time and learn it, it’s not rocket science. But that seems like a weird standard for an essential tool used for one of the most common computing tasks of today.

    In response to your initial question, obviously it’s a meme. But like most good memes, it’s born out of a common* human experience. What do you think is the most common reaction when someone is thrown into vim for the first time? My guess is “what’s this?” or something similar, followed very soon by “how do I exit this?”. And the answer is, by modern computer users’ standards, quite arcane.

    IF you are somewhat familiar with the Linux terminal, you’ll try CTRL+C and IF you’re paying close attention you will notice that vim is giving you a hint. But if it’s your first time interacting with vim, chances are at least one of those conditions is not met. So now you’re stuck. And after an optional small moment of panic/disorientation, you google “how to exit vim” (provided you were at least lucky enough to notice/remember what program you’re in) => a meme is born.

    Exiting vim is almost like a right of passage for fresh Linux enjoyers. It’s not a hard task but it can seem daunting at first encounter, which is humorous given that quitting a program is normally such an easy thing to do.

    One more note, there is a group of people who will encounter vim quite unexpectedly and unintentionally: Windows users performing their first commit using git bash. They won’t even know they’re in vim, they’re dropped directly into edit mode and there’s no instructions for confirming the commit message, much less how to exit/cancel the operation.