It honestly depends on how you run things.

If everything is in containers, chances are you’re already getting the benefits of a firewall. For example, with podman or docker, you already explicitly expose ports, which is already a form of firewall. If you’re running things outside of containers, then yeah, I agree with you, there’s too much risk of something opening up a port you didn’t expect.

Everything I run is with podman, which exposes stuff with iptables rules. That’s the same thing a basic firewall does, so adding a firewall is superfluous unless you’re using it to do something else, like geoip filtering.

When in doubt, use a firewall. But depending on the setup, it could be unnecessary.

That’s kind of how I feel about EU4. I started w/ whatever the basic bundle was (base game + 2-3 DLC), and it was a ton of fun. Then when it got boring and I wanted more, I bought a couple more DLC when it was on sale. Rinse and repeat and now I have all of the DLC.

That’s how DLC should be. With Paradox games, you’re not paying for some stupid cosmetics, you are funding continued development to add fun new features to the game. Even if you don’t buy the DLC, you still get some nifty features in the free update.

So yeah, I think they do a good job w/ their DLC policy. Though I do wish they’d make older DLC free or incredibly cheap.

If you can’t see trump becoming a dictator

He’s like 80yo. He’s not going to. There’s a better chance that he has a heart attack.

And yeah, countries watch US politics closely, and they’re very unhappy with Trump’s stupid tariffs. His strategy seems to be to jack up tariffs to devalue the dollar a bit to make exports more attractive longer-term. He doesn’t want to annex Canada (though Canadians won’t hesitate to blow that up since there’s an election coming up next month), he doesn’t want to annex Greenland (but he probably wants some land for bases), and he doesn’t want much to do with anything south of the border. He wants to create lots of blue-collar jobs, because blue-collar workers for some reason have been shifting toward the Republican Party, and it’s his job to make the Republican Party more attractive.

I think the whole strategy is dangerous and stupid from an economics standpoint, but I don’t see it as fascist. It’s certainly isolationist and nationalist though, but I see zero indication that he’s interested in nationalizing anything. Maybe I’m wrong, but what I see is a lot of people who are mad because Trump doesn’t listen to them, so they spout alarmist nonsense.

That said, what Musk is doing is absolutely dangerous on another level entirely. He’s putting sensitive data into a format that could be fairly easily attacked by state actors. There’s a good reason we have data separated, and it’s not to intentionally make government ineffective, it’s largely following the principle of least privilege, and Musk is demolishing that. It’s incredibly dangerous, and I’m surprised he hasn’t gotten more pushback on it.

You can believe what you want, of course, but my read is that Trump is pursuing stupid economic policy in a crazy attempt to be remembered long-term as the guy that “fixed” the US economy, not trying to become a dictator. He wants to be remembered.

price at enterprise scale

Really? I thought that’s where big cloud services fleece customers the hardest… We use AWS at work, and I’m always surprised when I ask our devOPs how much we’re paying.

My understanding is they’re selling the “time is money” angle, where things work together well so you spend less time getting stuff set up.

Mozilla could probably survive with no additional funding, but they’d have to make some steep cuts. They have many millions in investments, enough to fund something like $20M indefinitely. That’s a lot lower than their current budget, but probably reasonable if they only needed to develop Firefox.

If Google funding is pulled entirely, they’ll likely find a search deal (e.g. Bing, DDG, etc), but it’ll be a lot less in royalties. However, if you look at their financials, they’re already putting a lot of the Google money away into investments, so they can certainly survive some cuts, provided they can something in the ballpark of what Google was offering.

They did, it’s often a CLI interface because it’s incredibly flexible. ffmpeg and imagemagick are quite easy for basic things.

Building a cross-platform GUI is a pain, and hosting a website costs money. Building a cross-platform CLI is incredibly easy, which is why it’s so popular.

Some of these tools have GUI frontends or alternatives, some don’t. The more niche you go, the harder it’ll be to find a reasonable GUI, and I consider PDF to JPEG pretty niche.

I don’t use Watchtower, but many images follow semver so setting the version to something that you feel comfortable with can help.

I use podman and set my images to auto-update, and I just use a tag that’s broad enough to probably not break stuff with the auto-updates.

Always wait a couple days before doing a big upgrade. These smaller projects tend to have patch releases pretty soon after a major release.

I use Actual Budget, and they have had a .1 release within a day or so of pretty much every release since I’ve been using them.

If you’re okay debugging some stuff, by all means, get the .0 right away and submit reports. But if you’re not going to do that, wait a couple days.

Wait, so saving a ton of money by using a language that reduces production bugs is now a bad thing?

I’m a senior sw engineer, and I don’t get paid because I know the vagueries of whatever language we’re using, I get paid because I can lead a team that solves problems. I don’t really care what the language is, but I do care that it’s relatively easy to on-board someone in case we have turnover or something.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be highly paid because I’m able to be really productive instead of highly paid because I’m literally the only shot the company has of fixing the bug.

You know what those web services do? I just click a button and it does what the button says. Why is that so hard?

There’s also a pretty big chance that they’ll do more than what the button says, like inject malware. That’s the whole point of the article.

the lack of OOP

Rust absolutely has OOP, that’s what Traits are for. It just doesn’t have classical inheritance, so you structure your patterns a bit differently.

That said, I lean more into functional-inspired style anyway, which tends to work pretty well w/ Rust.

Can confirm, I’m a senior and I didn’t have much trouble with Rust. After a couple weeks, I was writing useful code. After a month, I generally stopped cussing at the compiler.

I’m still finding odd surprises here and there, but it’s honestly no big deal. I’m about as productive in Rust as I am in Python, which I use at my day job, though I use them for very different domains.

The only reason most of these places that do that though, is because they wrote in COBOL to begin with decades ago, and didn’t want to switch away to something more modern as other languages gained functionality and popularity.

And it would’ve been much cheaper to rewrite once some years ago than to keep paying people to maintain it.

And in many cases, rewriting something improves the code substantially by finding bugs and fixing architectural issues. Old code doesn’t mean it’s correct, it’s just old, and just today we had a high severity bug from code that was never properly tested and sat unchanged since near the start of the project.

not even c++

You dodged a bullet. I much prefer writing in C to C++.

You do you, I guess. Those are incredibly simple commands I provided, and you can intuit pretty easily how to tweak them for other formats.

I guess it’s up to you. You can gamble with random services online, or you can spend a few minutes and learn to use a tool that’s all but guaranteed to not have malware.

You are doing the classic “hitler did some good things too” argument

I’m really not. Hitler was a very different situation than Trump, and if you think they’re directly comparable, you need to take a break from the internet.

Yeah Trump sucks, and he’s dangerous (but mostly in an inept sort of way). I get it. But I think it’s highly unlikely that he tries to take dictatorial control of the US in any meaningful capacity.

There are some reasonable Republicans who don’t like the nonsense Trump is doing. In fact, I’d be surprised if most Republicans aren’t a fan of him flagrantly ignoring the law. Don’t lump them all into the same set of problems, that’s just going to put roughly half of the US against you. Instead of that, you could find some common ground and get a significant number to be on your side. Why fan this stupid culture war nonsense more than necessary?

Call out bad policy, acknowledge good policy, and demand accountability for lawbreaking.

Brendan Eich isn’t some secret Project 2025 mastermind, he’s just a dude that thinks privacy on the web is important and thinks his company has an interesting approach to solving that problem. Yeah, he has at least one bad political view, but that doesn’t mean everything he touches is automatically terrible.

Handbrake has a GUI, and it’s relatively straightforward to use. VLC also works well. You can also use ffmpeg on the CLI like so:

ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 output_video.avi

imagemagick isn’t really that hard, in most cases it’s:

convert <file1> <file2>

For example:

convert file.pdf file.jpg

If that doesn’t work, try pdftoppm:

pdftoppm input.pdf outputname -png

I don’t know of a good GUI for it, I recommend just learning to use either imagemagick or pdftoppm.

I guess that depends on what you mean by “support.” You can support certain things the administration does while attacking others. I dislike most of what Trump has done, but I happen to like a few things Trump has done as well. It’s totally rational to say what you do and don’t like about a given administration. I voted for Biden, for example, and I was happy that he largely stayed out of my news feed and actually pulled us out of Afghanistan, but I’m not particularly happy about much of the rest of his presidency (still don’t regret my vote though).

I don’t know how far Eich’s “support” goes, you’d have to ask him that. All I know is that he isn’t a fan of same-sex marriage at the government level. Maybe he’s a single issue voter, or maybe it’s something else. I don’t know, I haven’t seen much about his political preferences.

My point is that we shouldn’t jump down someone’s throat and start assuming a whole host of things based on very limited evidence.

Why? I highly doubt this little protest will meaningfully impact their bottom line.

That said, I always recommend diversifying. Invest in broad index funds instead of individual stocks and you’ll most likely be better off long-term.

But why? There are already a lot of great services based in Europe. For example, Hetzner and OVH. Their product offerings aren’t exactly 1:1 w/ those big three, but they have a lot of great tools, and you can get pretty far w/ a DIY approach, you just need to hire some OPs people to manage things. Hetzner even has S3-compatible storage.

I get that there’s a lot of interesting abstractions w/ places like AWS, but I’m also of the opinion that a lot of it is unnecessary and just adds cost. Learn to orchestrate things properly and build some tooling to utilize the APIs these cloud services provide, and you can achieve the same thing for less cost.