Hacker News: interf4ce

New comment by interf4ce in "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"

interf4ce — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:16:18 +0000

This is very interesting. I'm not sure what I'd use it for yet, but I imagine it could be useful for triggering ad hoc jobs over the network. Maybe have Home Assistant make a network call to kick off a daily back up when I leave the office at the end of a work day.

New comment by interf4ce in "What Is a Dickover?"

interf4ce — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:39:14 +0000

Protecting forms with reCAPTCHA uses cookies that fall under "marketing" and gathering site stats using Google Analytics uses cookies that fall under "marketing" and "statistics," making a consent banner or dickover pretty much required.

Are these services necessary for a page to work? Not at all, but many businesses consider them crucial. Unprotected public forms almost immediately start getting spammed by bots, burying real, important communications from potential clients. GA offers insight into what visitors to your site are looking for, which has real business value.

I don't like it any more than you do, but I get why businesses would choose to use these. On their end, at least with reCAPTCHA, they're just trying to protect themselves from the complete shitshow that the modern web has become.

New comment by interf4ce in "What Is a Dickover?"

interf4ce — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:16:53 +0000

It can be, see Global Privacy Control [1]. As an example, the Complianz consent plugin for WordPress can detect and respect the user's GPC setting, but that feature can be toggled. So even though this exists, many sites will still ignore it.

1. https://globalprivacycontrol.org/

New comment by interf4ce in "Proton Meet"

interf4ce — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:47:12 +0000

I don't think that's the target audience here.

Proton makes safer, more private (than, say, Gmail) email a possibility for people who don't have much technical knowledge but who know enough to want to keep their emails out of Google's hands.

If you have both the knowledge and time to run a server, by all means, that can make sense (and can be fun!). It's just not as widely applicable.

New comment by interf4ce in "The Boring Internet"

interf4ce — Wed, 06 May 2026 10:52:50 +0000

I can't help but wonder if we've already hit the point where real people now write like that because it's what they're exposed to day in and day out.

I have zero evidence to back this up but I'm convinced that autocorrect is what led to people pluralizing word's with apostrophe's. If we keep outsourcing how we express our ideas, how long until we no longer have any left?

New comment by interf4ce in "Hold on to Your Hardware"

interf4ce — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:56:06 +0000

You're right, Electron is not inherently bad and apps need RAM. There's no getting around that.

The issue with Electron is that it encourages building desktop apps as self-contained websites. Sure, that makes it easier to distribute apps across systems and OSes, but it also means you've got front end web devs building system applications. Naturally, they'll use what they're used to: usually React, which exacerbates the problem. Plus it means that each app is running a new instance of a web browser, which adds overhead.

In real life, yeah, it's rare that I actually encounter a system slowdown because yet another app is running on Electron. I just think that it's bad practice to assume that all users can spare the memory.

I'll admit that my concern is more of a moral one than a practical one. I build software for a living and I think that optimizing resource usage is one way to show respect to my users (be they consumers, ops people running the infra, or whatever). Not to mention that lean, snappy apps make for a better user experience.

New comment by interf4ce in "Hold on to Your Hardware"

interf4ce — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:23:42 +0000

The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by the software that actually needs it, like video editing, data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a vacuum with all system resources available to it. This mindset of "but consumers have so much RAM these days" just leads to worse and worse software design instead of programmers actually learning how to do things well. That's not a good direction and it saddens me that making software that minimizes its system footprint has become a niche instead of the mainstream.

tl;dr, no one is looking for their RAM to stay idle. They're looking for their RAM to be available.