broken-kebab (u/broken-kebab)

broken-kebab commented on Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help hey.paris/posts/appleid/... · Posted by u/parisidau

tonymet · a day ago

I back up regularly using Google Takeout and similar tools, but I don’t think it’s fair to shame this author . Even if you have backups , your recent and essential content and credentials will be locked out . 1% of your content is the most important

We all depend heavily on cloud storage and sso . Everything works fine until you are locked out .

And using them isn’t fully voluntary. They are necessary for collaboration . You end up using what your team uses .

You can try to be that “own cloud” snob but it only works if you live in a basement

Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure

You’re just not imaginative enough if you think you’re safe .

OPs only recourse is an insider or a lawyer

broken-kebab · a day ago

It could be a reasonable opinion, but unfortunate choice of words made it angry (and FWIW snobbish) towards wrong people.

broken-kebab commented on If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books? newyorker.com/news/fault-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

patates · 3 days ago

I quit social media many years ago and to answer the question: No, I just watch Youtube. If I could stop watching Youtube, I'm totally sure I'd finally be able to read books again /s

The problem is the award delay. In Youtube, I get my "award" in 10 minutes max. Starting to enjoy a book requires 1-2 hours investment, and the award can be anything between 1 and 10 in a scale of 10 (while median being more like 7), and Youtube is 3-6 with a rare 9.

I read a lot of self-improvement books lately, or heard to be honest. They didn't help me start reading. Atomic Habits came close.

I have (diagnosed, yet untreated, because of side effects) ADHD though. So maybe not the typical experience. I also couldn't read much (or do any homework) as a child.

Currently trying to stop myself from starting with short videos.

broken-kebab · 3 days ago

Maybe you didn't quit really. "Social media" is a rather misleading term now. With TikTok success, almost all of them bet on short video format. So really Youtube is in the same group as Instagram, FB, TikTok, and Xwitter.

broken-kebab commented on Perl's decline was cultural beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

broken-kebab · 7 days ago

This theory may only sound convincing if you ignore parts of history which don't fit. Which is pretty much all of them. RTFM-culture was the norm for all online computer-related communities until 00s. Nothing of this phenomenon is Perl-specific.

In late 80s and early 90s professional knowledge was way harder to get. Learning required significant devotion, and often was obtainable through experience only, and at the same time computer-related work wasn't as well-paid as it will become later. And had controversial social standing. Like, my brother said "It will hurt your chances with girls, bro!" when I told him I want to be a programmer, and with typical sibling-love added "This, and your ugly face of course".

RTFM emerged naturally with all of these: people paid with their time and social life for this knowledge, and wrote down what they found in manuals, most often for free, and you can't just bother to read them?

FWIW most BOFH types in my memory were C programmers, and early Linux UGs. Perlists in comparison were mild, and way more open (Perl community included biologists, linguists, and other non stereotypically computer people).

Perl decline was to some extent a cultural thing. But absolutely not the culture the author means. In Perl Larry Wall promoted a sort of expressive style of writing code where you can chose between several compiler-equivalent ways to implement logic: There is More Than One Way To Do It (aka Tim Toady) principle. The alleged reason is that the choice you make conveys some subtle nuances of your thinking which 1) gives you more comfort while coding, 2) gives potentially more information to someone who will read your code. This was outrageously contrary to the mainstream tendency of commoditization of software development (and software developers) which started to gain the steam at those times. Managers wanted (and I guess still want though to the date the idea mostly failed) THE one and only right way to code each task, peferrably with the only one language (with Java as the main contender), standard training programs, and certifications - all across all domains, and as a result replaceable and transferrable coders. Perl was clearly unfit for this perfect future with its proud selection of 4 or 5 implementations of OOP, and it hurt the language promotion a lot. And then there was disastrously optimistic declaration about soon-to-be major uprgade to Perl 6 which in reality will take 15+ years, all while lots of interesting things happening outside.

broken-kebab commented on School cell phone bans and student achievement nber.org/digest/202512/sc... · Posted by u/harias

lmm · 12 days ago

> That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.

Children raised in cultures where alcohol is soft- rather than hard-banned for young people, and gradually introduced to it with parents around (think European teenagers having a glass of wine with lunch), tend to have healthier relationships with alcohol in later life than those raised in hard-ban-until-18/21 cultures. I think exactly the same will prove true of phones.

broken-kebab · 10 days ago

These things are not comparable. Alcohol is so old a thing we not only built plenty of stable cultural norms around it but we even developed genetic adaptations.

And speaking of culture, as an Eastern European I would argue our rules regarding alcohol are not soft. Yes, we drink, even expected to drink on some ritualized occasions. But contrary to Hollywood depictions, it's not cool to be a non-functional alco in our lands. When society decides you can't manage yourself, it builds harsh zone of exclusion around you. Imagine you have an uncle Jim who is constantly doomscrolling and for that he has no chances with a good reliable woman, his job opportunities are limited to something non-prestigious, people talk about him like he's a dimwit, even kids look down at him. He's recognized as a failure of a man and parents don't miss a chance to remind about the bad example to their kids. That would be "not-hard" rules EE style.

broken-kebab commented on Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years yaky.dev/2025-11-30-self-... · Posted by u/the-anarchist

AJ007 · 13 days ago

I don't know what's wrong with XMPP other than the network effect collapsed when the GMail chat thing was killed, while the mobile client options were poor for a very long time.

Matrix has the appearance of being a drop in replacement for Slack or Discord, but the design decisions seem so compromised that the only explanation is they did manage to establish a (somewhat weak) network effect? It certainly is not a good look for an open source project to be running on Slack or Discord (free/cheap plans rugpulled or to be soon.) Then that leaves IRC, which has a network effect collapsing at a much slower pace.

I never got far enough to try hosting a matrix server, but reading the linked post -- Matrix definitely is not GDPR compliant. The combination of whatever end form of ChatControl the EU gets along with possibly hundreds of other laws across the world and individual US states makes me think the days of a public facing non-profit or small startup running a project like this are over. (Or maybe the future of open source is funding lawyers while the development is all done for pennies by AI?)

broken-kebab · 11 days ago

In what way do you think it's not compliant with GDPR?

broken-kebab commented on Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years yaky.dev/2025-11-30-self-... · Posted by u/the-anarchist

Almondsetat · 13 days ago

Nobody claimed it isn't a useful feature. The only claim I made is that it cannot be mandated with an open protocol, so if you expect 100% adherence in the name of privacy, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

broken-kebab · 13 days ago

Good, nobody claimed any expectation of 100% adherence as well!

broken-kebab commented on Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years yaky.dev/2025-11-30-self-... · Posted by u/the-anarchist

nicoco · 13 days ago

An open protocol can mandate indeed, but that is still in the realm of pinky promise security. A better design for a privacy-friendly chat protocol is to not write a lot of stuff on a lot of different remote servers when that's not necessary IMHO. One of matrix's selling points is to be censorship-proof though; in that case copying stuff as much as possible makes a lot more sense.

broken-kebab · 13 days ago

>pinky promise security

You are right, though I still prefer "weak feature" as a term :) There's enough value in such things. Cryptography crowd is concentrated on omnipotent Eve breaking ciphers, and that wrench from xkcd, but I dare to claim that majority of both commercial and private leaks happen just because well-intentioned users don't have enough capacity to keep track of all the things, and proverbially think twice. Features like "unsend", or timed deletion are indeed laughable on their purely technical merits, but do wonders saving users from grave mistakes anyway.

broken-kebab commented on Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years yaky.dev/2025-11-30-self-... · Posted by u/the-anarchist

Almondsetat · 13 days ago

A protocol can only support, never mandate. If I send you "DELETE MSG #4829" and you do nothing and reply with "200 OK; DELETE MSG #4829", nobody observing the protocol's messages will ever know what happened. Sure, an omniscent being could say "but he internally broke protocol, he didn't delete the message!", but by definition if something cannot be verified inside the protocol, it is outside of protocol.

broken-kebab · 13 days ago

I don't know such definition frankly. And to the best of my knowledge there are plenty of things which people call "protocols" strongly prescribing actions non-verifiable in the very sense you used. That said I'm not here for a terminological discussion. We may call it green cheese, but it's still a useful feature.

broken-kebab commented on Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years yaky.dev/2025-11-30-self-... · Posted by u/the-anarchist

Almondsetat · 13 days ago

>this also creates a situation where anything said across federation cannot be unsaid, which is an ironic situation for a protocol/system that often comes up when talking about privacy.

How is it ironic? No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. Chat apps that implement this function are either proprietary (so you cannot control what they can do) or, if OSS, do it on a pinky-promise-basis.

broken-kebab · 13 days ago

A protocol can mandate forced deletion. A particular client implementation may ignore it, or some users may circumvent it, so it would be a weaker kind of feature, but still a feature. And depending on circumstances it can be quite useful.

broken-kebab commented on Exploring the Fragmentation of Wayland, an xdotool adventure semicomplete.com/blog/xdo... · Posted by u/viraptor

codedokode · 21 days ago

It is possible if you write a custom program for that, but not by simply configuring X. If you configure Shift to switch layouts, you won't be able to use it as a modifier.

For comparison, in Windows you can use Ctrl+Shift or Alt+Shift to switch layouts and use shortcuts (like Ctrl+Shift+A) with these modifiers. In X, you cannot.

broken-kebab · 21 days ago

"Custom program" is a bit too serious sounding wording for a 5 lines shell script.

>in Windows you can use [...] In X, you cannot.

Well, I can. What you probably mean is that in X you don't have a GUI for this. But X is text configurable/scriptable by design. GUI is a concern of an upper level software.