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🔗 Nikita Prokopov: Needy Programs
A thought provoking post.
And even if you give up and create [an account for a program that requires one], they will never leave you alone: they’ll ask for 2FA, then for password rotation, then will log you out for no good reason. You’ll never see the end of it either way.
The topic of passkeys came up at work yesterday. A colleague made the suggestion that passkeys should be mandated across everything, with very few exceptions. The reasons he gave are decent, of course: protecting accounts from unwanted intrusions. Yet I didn’t really agree with him. I know for myself I find them a little annoying, and knowing a few people who aren’t as steeped in technology as I are, I do wonder how well they would receive such a mandate. Probably in a similar way to Nikita here.
And it’s a tricky balancing act, because they are more secure than passwords. And so is asking for 2FA, and password rotations, and logging you out after a while (that’s to avoid a session token from leaking and falls into the wrong hands, and being usable for ever). And sometimes they’re necessary: there are a lot of arseholes out there. But they are annoying, and when it comes to authentication, it’s usually the default position of any developer to say “lock down all the things,” without considering tradeoffs.
So yeah, I don’t have a good answer here. Not even sure there is one.
Via: Manton Reece
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Using KDiff 3 is like using an old hammer you have lying on the workbench in a joinery. It been there for years, and it’s covered in sawdust and varnish. It leaves your hand sticky after you use it; handling it is not a pleasant experience. But it’s there; and when you need it, it frickin’ works.
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It’s a shame that there’s no market for a low cost, standalone, well designed visual diffing tool. The candidates seem to be either free ones with a mediocre user experience, or anything built into the IDEs. Everything else is quite expensive, upwards of $40.00. Nothing meets in the middle.
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I didn’t expect to like today’s Stratechey interview, what with “turnarounds” sounding somewhat corporatey in the abstract. Yet, I found it really enjoyable. Matthew Bromberg gave some fascinating stories of his career.
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🔗 Android Developers Blog: Android developer verification
Under the heading “Empowering experienced users” (emphasis original):
Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified.
In other words: side loading should be possible without verification. This is good.
Via: Hacker News
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I could be the only Melburnian I know that enjoyed travelling on the Hitachi trains on hot days. To hear the deafening journey they take through the loop with the windows down was always a thrill.
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“Get out more” goal for November achieved. ✅
Boardgames at the Melbourne Central Lion Hotel. Bought along Wingspan tonight. Was a huge hit: better than I hoped. Played a full game with 3 other players. 👍
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I will admit, I was a hater of Stripe’s new developer tools that slid up from the bottom when I first used them. But I’ve grown to really like them. They have the one thing I’ve been wishing from Stripe from the beginning, which is showing how the entity you’re looking at looks from the API.
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On TOON And Human Readable Data Formats
My thoughts on defining human readable formats that are difficult to modify by hand, and taking it out on TOON which is geared towards LLMs. Continue reading →
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Did not expect to be back here again, riding the Comengs like it’s going out of style. Such is this year’s theme, unfortunately.
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TIL that
⎋is the symbol for the Escape key. HT @jason@social.lol -
Slow strobes.
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This clip made me think. Not because of anything to do with Apple, Google, and their dealings. Rather, it made me wonder if this is applicable to things like how one spends their time and effort at self improvement. Focusing more on what you know your good at, for example.
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Oof! Stock music is expensive, but I found the track I’ve been craving. One useful feature of the stock music site: ability to filter songs based on key and tempo. Tapped what I thought the tempo was on my keyboard metronome to get around 8 BPM off the actual one. Perfect pitch did the rest.
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I think I know why it always takes two attempts to get the Myki readers to work with Google Wallet. The new readers throwing up the error “credit card not supported” provides a decent hint.
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Idea for browser plugin: something that scans all the links on the page, and annotates each one pointing to YouTube, offering you to add the video to your “watch later” list. I see plenty of interesting videos I never watch because I find a link to it at a time that’s not ideal for watching video.
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Watched an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. In one day the crew of that sub encountered:
- a collision with a whale,
- being threatened by sea monster,
- the diving bell getting loose,
- overpressure in the ballast tank,
- a smoke bomb,
- a sabatour sending fake radio signals,
- an explosion of the main tank causing flooding, and
- getting hijacked by a duo of criminals, twice.
Not a dull moment on that sub, apparently. 😛
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Ooh, looks like the Pixel 9 Pro has a HDR screen. I’ve been using this phone for 10 months and it’s only today when I’ve noticed it. So this is how the other half were living all these years.
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I ♥️ Stock Music.
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Devlog: Laying The Groundwork For Dynamic Header Images
Making some changes to the Card theme I’m using for this blog. First think I’m considering is a banner image, similar to the one in Scripting News. And like Scripting News, I’m hoping for the image to change occasionally. I’d like the change to happen when the blog is being built, and in order to do this, I need a way to configure this value. I’m hoping to use Blogging Tools to do this, but to actually make use of these values, I’m hoping to use Hugo’s resource data methods. Continue reading →
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🔗 Raph Koster: Game design is simple, actually
I’m only half way through this, but I’m finding this post on the theory of game design absolutely riveting. I’ve already got a bunch of linked posts ready to go, marking this one as the entrance to a good ol’ blogging rabbit hole.
Via: Simon Willison
