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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • That used to be true but no longer. For anything but gaming Apple’s M series chips are amazing.

    I’m a 30+ year Windows and Linux user and developer that preferred machines I could build myself. A few years ago switched jobs and was given an M1 Pro for work… it’s incredible how good, fast and low power the M series are. I’ve used my laptop 8 hours straight without plugging it in. That’s simply not doable with any other machine.

    I still dislike their walled garden, and for high end gaming Apple’s a no-go, but for most things it’s hard to argue with how good they are. The machines may come at a premium, but they are high quality, work great and for battery use they don’t have a rival.





  • The need for privacy in crypto is significant and a hinderance to wide adoption. With most crypto if you send me money once I then know your wallet address and I can then look up every transaction you’ve ever made with that wallet and every future transaction you make later. Clearly that’s a problem.

    The fact that criminals are more motivated by privacy concerns doesn’t reduce the need and expectation of privacy for the rest of us.







  • The boosting of propaganda and the identification, tracking and exploitation of government targets.

    People in key government positions are still people like us and they love social media too. Having an app on their phone doing data mining can identify people of interest and then collect data, target and compromise them. Even without the app on a government issued phone they can identify key people using their personal phones and then target them for more sophisticated surveillance.







  • I know I’m a heretic but I’m a huge powershell fan. Once you work with an object-oriented shell you’ll wonder why you’ve dealt with parsing text for so long. Works great on Linux, MacOS and Windows, it’s open source, reads and writes csv, json and xml natively, native web and rest service support, built-in support for remote computing and parallel processing and extensive libraries for just about anything you can think of. It takes a little getting used to but it’s worth it.



  • As a long-time bash, awk and sed scripter who knows he’ll probably get downvoted into oblivion for this my recommendation: learn PowerShell

    It’s open-source and completely cross-platform - I use it on Macs, Linux and Windows machines - and you don’t know what you’re missing until you try a fully objected-oriented scripting language and shell. No more parsing text, built-in support for scalars, arrays, hash maps/associative arrays, and more complex types like version numbers, IP addresses, synchronized dictionaries and basically anything available in .Net. Read and write csv, json and xml natively and simply. Built-in support for regular expressions throughout, web service calls, remote script execution, and parallel and asynchronous jobs and lots and lots of libraries for all kinds of things.

    Seriously, I know its popular and often-deserved to hate on Microsoft but PowerShell is a kick-ass, cross-platform, open-source, modern shell done right, even if it does have a dumb name imo. Once you start learning it you won’t want to go back to any other.