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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 24th, 2023

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  • Recently, Linux removed several people from their organization that have Russian email addresses. Linus made a statement that confirmed this was done intentionally. I believe that there was some mention of following sanctions on Russia due to the war. I haven’t looked into the details of it all, so take my analysis with a grain of salt. From what I understand, it sounded like it was only Russian maintainers that were removed and normal users submitting code from Russia can still contribute. Maintainers have elevated permissions and can control what code gets accepted into a project, meaning that a bad actor could allow some malicious code to sneak past. This may have also contributed to the decision since this type of attack has happened before and Russia seems like a likely culprit. The reactions to this change have been varied. Some people feel it is somewhat justified or reasonable, some people think that it means it is no longer open source, and some people think it is unfairly punishing Russian civilians (it is worth noting that that is part of the point of sanctions).





  • For a physical book, I’m reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez. I’m not too far in yet, but I’m enjoying it so far. I am having some issues keeping track of names, which usually isn’t a problem for me, and I’m not sure why.

    For my drive to work, I’m listening to “Words of Radiance” by Brandon Sanderson. I’m not sure if I’m really enjoying it or not, but I’m giving it a chance. For the first book, I thought it was just okay until about the last third of the book, so we’ll see how this one turns out.


  • I’ve used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google’s (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.


  • I have a somewhat related real world story. I had a client that was convinced that tons of people were going to decompile their application and sell their own version of the program, so they insisted that they needed their code obfuscated to protect company secrets and make it harder to reverse engineer. I tried explaining to them that obfuscation wasn’t that big of a deterrent to someone attempting to steal code through reverse engineering and that it would likely cause some issues with debugging, but they were certain they needed it. Sure enough, they then had a real user run into an issue and were surprised to find that their custom logging system was close to useless because the application was outputting random obfuscated letters instead of function and variable names. We did have mapping files, but it took a lot of time to map each log message to make it readable enough to try to understand the user’s issue.



  • I can’t remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn’t load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?


  • User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I’m talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.