philsnow

It's so insane to have PDF programs doing their own encryption, not because "don't roll your own crypto" (although yes for that reason too), but because the people who write PDF programs (libraries, viewers, general-purpose tools like qpdf, etc etc) aren't (necessarily) going to be great at understanding or designing good encryption UX.

Also, I get that a lot of sensitive information is exchanged with PDFs these days, but why should PDFs have encryption built-in to the file format? Sensitive information is also exchanged in image files, word documents, zip files, html, etc etc etc etc. If you take all the work that goes into making the crypto UX decent for one kind of file and apply that to "all files", then each ecosystem doesn't have to invent their own.

This is just like "high-end" car manufacturers insisting on making their own software, and not integrating apple carplay. They're either going to make a truly shitty podcast app, or they're not even going to bother and instead tell people to use bluetooth to listen to podcasts like it's 2006.

Export to google drive, use rclone to copy it out of google drive. Much, much more robust.

The multi-day wait while they prepare the takeout for download, though... I have forgotten about more takeout exports than I have actually downloaded.

Don't know if it's what gp is talking about, but in areas prone to wildfire, there are often laws about keeping brush and weeds a certain distance away from any structures.

This is one of the things that killed xmpp (too many XEPs, experience was severely fragmented).

I used to use gnupass and its variants (including passforios on mobile), but what brought me to bitwarden was being able to make changes on two clients and merge the results cleanly / usefully without needing to do anything manually at all.

How does this work with keepassxc? Does it depend on your file syncing primitive?

You'll still only get half-truths, but maybe (maybe) the sum of the vectors will be roughly normal

I really can't tell if you mean "Explorer.exe is good enough and I never felt like it needed improvement" or "Oh, I can make anything I want to, with free tools? This is great! I'll make a file manager for my personal usage that's perfect for me."

I kind of wish i had tried this when i was younger, but VGA Planets got hold of me first and teenage me apparently had stupid video game tribalism

A couple clicks through to older lcamtuf posts and I came across this in the "what is electricity" post:

> Once again, we don’t have a satisfying explanation why. We know that these quantum numbers correspond to standing-wave solutions of a three-dimensional wave function that we pulled out of thin air. We also know that the model works better than any alternatives. But we don’t know what any of it really means — or if it means anything.

It is so refreshing to see this explicated thus; physics textbooks are generally coy about "know this for now, and there will be deeper insights available later" but they typically never level with readers and say "we don't know".

> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it

This is how I usually characterize AI to friends who have no background in computers: it's an indefatigable (that is, not able to be fatigued) employee who has read nearly everything in the world, who does make mistakes, but who never lacks for motivation.

Most humans would become discouraged after being told 20 times that their work fell short, but AI agents will persevere en masse until the oceans are boiled, for better or for worse.

> It's unclear what the value proposition is, paying for a MitM proxy.

Is that not exactly cloudflare?

People who are new to skiing/snowboarding are often surprised that their faces get sunburned, because of course it's cold and so how could they get burned

I don't keep anything on my phone anymore. I use gadzorp.

Yeah tuns (a word well known to homebrewers) is not as esoteric as yttria (a word known to.. chemists?)