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conor- commented on The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition (2023)   ahalbert.com/technology/2... · Posted by u/ahalbert2
IgorPartola · a month ago
I have read a number of programming books but the only two that really stood out to me and that I still remember are The Pragmatic Programmer and K&R The C Programming Language. They are obviously very different but foundational in ways that enabled me to get a lot of things done.

I do still encourage people to learn C only because you could understand how the language works or a long weekend and it will help you appreciate just how things actually work under the hood (and a bit above the assembly instructions level). And TPP is great for helping you understand what to do when actually working on a deliverable project and not just the exciting parts. It’s the difference between building a toy that runs on your machine and a project others can run and use.

conor- · a month ago
The book that's really stood out to me is the Kernighan/Pike "The Practice of Programming" as something that steered me in a really good direction when I was first learning to write code.

I really wish they'd do a revised 2nd edition using Golang as the base for the book instead of C; but otherwise it still really holds up well

conor- commented on Kubernetes Ingress Nginx is retiring   kubernetes.dev/blog/2025/... · Posted by u/TheApplicant
steve1977 · a month ago
If developers don't maintain their apps, it doesn't really matter that much how and where you deploy them. With Kubernetes, you just end up with unmaintained Docker images that potentially contain a ton of vulnerabilities.
conor- · a month ago
But with a containerized app image you can reduce the blast radius of the poorly maintained app compared to running it bare metal on a host with other services. Also you can still maintain base images to patch/try to reduce vulnerability surfaces
conor- commented on Steam Machine   store.steampowered.com/sa... · Posted by u/davikr
Sohcahtoa82 · a month ago
There isn't.

When it comes to anti-cheat on Linux, it's basically an elephant in the room that nobody wants to address.

Anti-cheat on Linux would need root access to have any effectiveness. Alternatively, you'd need to be running a custom kernel with anti-cheat built into it.

This is the part of the conversation where someone says anti-cheat needs to be server-side, but that's an incredibly naive and poorly thought out idea. You can't prevent aim-bots server-side. You can't even detect aim-bots server-side. At best, you could come up with heuristics to determine if someone's possibly cheating, but you'd probably have a very hard time distinguishing between a cheater and a highly skilled player.

Something I think the anti-anti-cheat people fail to recognize is that cheaters don't care about their cheats requiring root/admin, which makes it trivial to evade anti-cheat that only runs with user-level permissions.

When it comes to cheating in games, there are two options:

1. Anti-cheat runs as admin/root/rootkit/SYSTEM/etc.

2. The games you play have tons of cheaters.

You can't have it both ways: No cheaters and anti-cheat runs with user-level permissions.

conor- · a month ago
Rootkit anti-cheats can still often be bypassed using DMA and external hardware cheats, which are becoming much cheaper and increasingly common. There's still cheaters in Valorant and in Cs2 on faceit, both of which have extremely intrusive ACs that only run on Windows.

At the level of privilege you're granting to play a video game, you'd need to have a dedicated gaming PC that is isolated from the rest of your home network, lest that another crowdstrike level issue takes place from a bad update to the ring 0 code these systems are running

conor- commented on Steam Machine   store.steampowered.com/sa... · Posted by u/davikr
brian-armstrong · a month ago
The games would just leave Steam. The big publishers want their own platforms and launchers anyway.
conor- · a month ago
The big publishers already have their own launcher and platforms and are increasingly moving back onto Steam because they see higher PC player counts and sales when their games are there
conor- commented on Steam Machine   store.steampowered.com/sa... · Posted by u/davikr
hebejebelus · a month ago
Very interesting! The one killer issue that jumps to mind is anti-cheat. I switched away from gaming on Linux via Proton to gaming on Windows because Battlefield 6's anti-cheat won't work under Proton. Many games are like this, particularly some of the most popular (Rainbow 6 Siege for instance). And BF6 made this decision only recently despite the growing number of Steam Deck players (and other players on linux - in fairness I don't think there would have been that many BF6 players on a handheld).

Edit: I specifically use a gaming-only PC. The hardware is used for nothing else. Hence, discussions of rootkits don't really bother me personally much and on balance I'd really rather see fewer cheaters in my games. I think it would be the same with any of these machines - anything Steam-branded is likely to be a 99% gaming machine and their users will only care that their games work, not about the mechanisms of the anti-cheat software.

conor- · a month ago
I view it as Valve is doing me a favor by adding friction towards me installing a rootkit to play video games.

There's also been numerous userspace ACs that work well and also run in userspace (EAC, Battleye, etc.) that have been enabled for Linux/Proton users (including by EA with Apex Legends at one point). A lot of the support for Linux mostly comes down to the developer/publishers not wanting to and not because of technical reasons.

conor- commented on What I Self Host   fredrikmeyer.net/2025/10/... · Posted by u/FredrikMeyer
zahlman · 2 months ago
As far as I can tell, the price range for consumer PCs hasn't really moved since then. If anything it's worse now for people who expect to have a good quality graphics card. Owning a smartphone outright isn't cheap, either.
conor- · 2 months ago
You can buy a mini pc for >$200 USD that is capable of running most desktop tasks and can also handle server tasks. Good quality integrated graphics APUs are also plentiful and fairly easy to come by these days.
conor- commented on Matrix Conference 2025 Highlights   element.io/blog/the-matri... · Posted by u/Arathorn
Arathorn · 2 months ago
Element X now has initial support for threads & spaces (as of last week), which were the main things missing from full parity with Element Classic.
conor- · 2 months ago
Sorry to hijack this thread to ask - but what is the current state of sliding sync? Does it still require a separate proxy service to enable sliding sync if you're self-hosting a homeserver; or is it upstreamed into synapse? Also is there a list of clients that are sliding sync aware?
conor- commented on What I Self Host   fredrikmeyer.net/2025/10/... · Posted by u/FredrikMeyer
zahlman · 2 months ago
There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want to use it by pointing my browser at a machine name (of another device I own) and port number, rather than by launching a dedicated program?
conor- · 2 months ago
> what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly?

Having access to multiple computers/devices as a single user became cheap and more common. If it was still the 2000s (or maybe early 2010s) and somebody only used a single PC for most of their tasks that'd make sense, but that's just not the reality most people live anymore

conor- commented on DHH Is Worse Than I Thought   jakelazaroff.com/words/dh... · Posted by u/ciconia
leakycap · 3 months ago
> extremely prolific author,

prolific self-published author of free things on the internet sometimes also sold as books

> software engineer

along with many others who wrote great things in 2005! but what lately? the setup script called omarachy?

> entrepreneur

again, we're two decades from anything I'd call entrepreneurial

babies have born and can vote since the last major wave DHH made, but he's great at soundbites and attention cycles

conor- · 3 months ago
Looking through the commit graph for Omarchy is wild. It has 2000+ commits, most of which contain the type of intermediary work pushed into the trunk that you'd see from a jr who doesn't squash their local work

Also some gems like: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/commit/af72a45dbd4358bca...

> Remove non-existent vibe-code hallucinated options and clean up theme files

or https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/commit/4fedfbe9f19303046...

There's also Omakub[0] which was sort of a precursor to Omarchy that gives users the `wget <some url> | bash` as a means of installation where the install script is a thin wrapper around another `eval $(wget <some url>` that then git clones a repository and executes a 3rd script.

That's definitely the kinds of patterns I'd expect some prolific software engineer to use and also encourage complete novices to Linux to be comfortable just piping arbitrary wgets into a shell

[0] https://omakub.org/

conor- commented on Next.js is infuriating   blog.meca.sh/3lxoty3shjc2... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
camdenreslink · 3 months ago
Just by bringing up k8s you are making their point. It should be dead simple to do logging without having to set up hardly anything. I shouldn't even need to know what a sidecar container is.
conor- · 3 months ago
"dead simple" really depends on what you're targeting and how. If you're targeting a cloud deployment on hardware you don't control or that's running with multiple instances/replicas, OTEL makes that pretty simple because you get a lot for free in the way of tracking instances/correlation ids, etc.

If you wanted "dead simple" text-based logging in a situation where a service is deployed in multiple places you'd end up writing a lot of fluff to get the same log correlation abilities that most OTEL drivers provide (if you can even ship your logs off the compute to begin with)

Which again comes back to the "maybe the framework isn't for you" if you're building an application that's a monolith deployed on a single VPC somewhere. But situations where you're working on something distributed or replicated, OTEL is pretty simple to use compared to past vendor-specific alternatives

u/conor-

KarmaCake day263February 10, 2019View Original