d-s's comments

On: Run Your Own Mail Server – By Michael W Lucas

[d-s]

MWL makes amazing books. I think he may be my favorite technical writer out there.

On: Doing laundry on campus without a phone

[d-s]

You can block a lot more in an browser - like links to surveillance stat systems (mixpanel). It still possible to do that with an app, but it’s much more involving

[scarface_74 → d-s]

That’s also a permission on iOS to allow tracking.

But there is still nothing stopping a company from doing server side analytics and tracking.

On: Doing laundry on campus without a phone

[d-s]

A phone or a smartphone with is from big 2?

[Tee3993 → d-s]

Local number was required to receive SMS. Foreign numbers were not supported. I only had foreign data SIM.

On: Doing laundry on campus without a phone

[d-s]

Sidestep I’d say as we’ve never seen that before. Sidestep into hell, but still a side.

On: Seven Sins of Writing

[d-s]

Why the hell is passive voice so frowned up by Americans?

[taneq → d-s]

I think you mean "Why the hell do Americans frown on passive voice?" ;)

I blame the early MS Word grammar checker which always called out passive voice as poor style. :P I'd imagine it was written that way because passive voice was easy to detect, and corporate power posturing tended to paint passive voice as 'weak'.

That said, passive voice is also associated with weasel wording and evasiveness, so if you're trying to communicate clearly and directly, it might not be the best way to phrase things.

[racktash → d-s]

I suspect Elements of Style is at the root of "avoiding passive" being popular advice.

It's a decent rule of thumb for those of us who accidentally slip into writing in the passive. Too much passive leads to writing that feels less direct, less active. Alas, as with every rule of thumb, you will get people who take it as a commandment and loudly denounce any and all use of passive, thinking they're being clever. I worked with a tech doc writer who liked to point out passive voice usage in peoples' work emails. Whatever gets you through life I guess...

On: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

[d-s]

It’s quite common. I own only open headphones due to this

On: Nudify LLM

[d-s]

No. It Does not.

It’s the LLM of LLMs.

On: Ask HN: How many computers have you got?

[d-s]

What software is that?:-)

[retrocryptid → d-s]

MPW, Hypercard and the CanonCat Humane Editor.

On: Understanding Passkeys

[d-s]

Thanks!

On: Desktop FreeBSD won't improve unless people are using it

[d-s]

Could you give some example? Not attacking, I'm just curious.

[rahen → d-s]

Examples of feature creep? Sure. Rust is a good example. Anytime we deprecate a functioning C program with a Rust one, or add a Rust dependency somewhere, we also deprecate older hardware which can't cope with it, and make those machines useless.

Let's not even mention Electron, at least it won't work on NetBSD and OpenBSD, which prevents a lot of bloat.

Most Linux folks won't care about resource usage because they purposefully use powerful machines with gigs of memory, which hides inefficiencies.

NetBSD does the opposite, they purposefully test and develop the system on small, constrained hardware, whether new (ARM SBCs) or old (VAX stations, 486s and alike). But we can't fork the whole userland, so when Linux moves to large, bloated layers, it compromises a lot of efforts to keep the userland tight and fit.