This is literally lemmy, a (relatively) niche platform where somebody is asking about a (relatively) niche subject. I dont think anything about this is a average person.
‘Average person’ was in quotes because it’s the language you used to describe someone not comfortable with the command line.
I mean what’s the point of “self” hosting then?
If you have to be a professional server administrator to host one of these services, then why even have a self hosting community as opposed to just a hosting community for server admins to discuss how to set and configure various services? Is this community dedicated to just discussing the uniqueness of managing a home server without a static IP?
Self hosting is just an extension of open source software. It’s only goal is being able to run your own backends of apps to not be exploited by major companies. It’s goal is not to be a niche technical hobby, if that’s your goal in its own right, then get a model train or a Warhammer set.
Mainstream consumers don’t know words “Plex” and “Home Assistant” either.
Yes, they do lol. It’s flat out weird to think that the only people who have ever heard of pirating are software developers and server admins who use the command line.
You’re viewing this through an incredibly skewed lense. The average person will never even consider self hosting nor will care, if anything the average person prefers cloud services.
The only lens I’m viewing this through is one that dares to imagine that the Venn diagram of “computer users savvy enough to care about privacy” isn’t 100% contained within the circle of “computer users savvy with the terminal”.
Quite frankly your stance that the ‘average person’ doesn’t care, when this post is LITERALLY from an ‘average person’ who does, is the one that seems off base on its face.
Notice that it hasn’t amongst mainstream consumers.
You know what self hosted projects have been successes? Plex and Home Assistant. You know what projects don’t require the terminal? Plex and Home Assistant.
Self hosting is doomed until this isn’t the answer.
Bugs and security problems aren’t bad UX, they’re a backlog.
No, they’re not. If you are building a platform for developers to build apps on and you design your API in a way that’s easy to introduce security vulnerabilities that’s not a backlog, that’s a badly designed platform that will be riddled with insecure apps creating a crappy, untrustworthy, ecosystem. And since those bugs are in third party apps you have no control over whether app developers are aware of them or if they’ll ever get to them in their backlog.
Again, this is literally the same thing as the JavaScript equality comparator.
It’s not a bad idea for a user facing UX in some cases, but it’s not good for all cases and thus shouldn’t be implemented at the low file system level.
You keep thinking you’re prioritizing UX, while ignoring and talking past the mountain of bugs and security problems this causes, as if those aren’t catastrophic UX problems.
I am a bit confused about how you suggest implementing a file system where two files can have the same user-facing name in document names, file manager paths, shortcuts/symlinks, file selectors and everywhere else exposed by the user without having the file system prevent two files with the same case-insensitive name existing next to each other. That seems literally worse in every way and not how filenames are implemented in any filesystem I’ve ever used or known about. I could be wrong, though.
You can literally toggle case sensitivity on a folder by folder basis in Windows, it just defaults to the wrong one.
But whatever it is, it NEEDS to make sure grandma will never see Office.exe and office.exe next to each other in the same directory. Deal?
Not until you establish an internationally agreed on standard for what that is. Just throwing at a glib easy example is not a standard.
As this whole article is saying, there isn’t one.
No, hold on, this is not about the OS.
Holding on.
This is about whether the filesystem in the OS supports case insensitive names.
K, now that we’re done being pedantic…
That determines whether the GUI supports case insensitive names down the line, so the choices made by the filesystem and by the OS support of the filesystem must be done with the usability of the GUI in mind.
Oh yes, let’s prioritize making sure that when grandmas are using the raw filesystem they’re not confused by case sensitivity, totally worth it over stable, bug-free, secure, software.
Definitely couldn’t have just built grandmas a case insensitive option on the user portion of the file system instead of introducing bugs and edges cases into literally every single piece of software they might use…
There is no need to go any further than case insensitive filenames. At all. Rolling case insensitive filenames into the same issue is entirely an attempt to make a case against a pet peeve for unrelated reasons.
This is literally just the same issue. I cannot see what two issues you are separating this into.
All of this stems from case insensitive file names.
But you do NOT give up on the functionality or user experience because of the edge cases. You don’t design a user interface (and that’s what a OS with a GUI is, ultimately) for consistency or code elegance, you design it for usability. Everything else works around that.
The OS is not the GUI. Every GUI you see in the OS is an application running on top of the actual OS.
The OS should not arbitrarily decide that some characters are the same as others, it should respect the unified standards for what bytes represent what characters. Unless there is an internationally agreed upon standard for EXACTLY what case insensitive means for every character byte code, then you are building a flawed system that will ruin the user experience when massive bugs and stability issues come up because you didn’t actually plan out your system properly to cover edge cases.
You know, as Linus is pointing out given his multi decade history of running Linux.
Now, character byte codes are a different thing, and it’s true that the gripe in this particular rant seems to be almost more focused into weird unicode quirks and the case sensitivity thing seems to be mostly a pet peeve he rolls into it, I suspect somewhat facetiously.
No, it has nothing to do with “weird Unicode quirks”.
It has everything to do with their being a universal standard for representing different characters, and the file system deciding to then apply its own random additional standard on top that arbitrarily decides some thing are probably the same as others.
This is just like Javascript’s early ==, fuzzy equality choice. It was done to be helpful, but was a fuzzy system that doesn’t cover enough edge cases to be implemented at that low of a level.
Case insensitive file systems arent lazy, they’re a programmer putting in a lot of effort to try and be helpful only to realize that their helpful system doesn’t actually cover all the edge cases it needs to and thus just adds a whole extra layer of complication and annoyance to the project.
OSs and filesystems aren’t built for programmers, they’re built for grandmas.
You’re just flat out and completely wrong.
If you can’t imagine why this is bad, maybe read some Kafka or watch some Black Mirror.
Lmfao. Yeah, ok, let’s get my predictions from the depressing show dedicated to being relentlessly pessimistic at every single decision point.
And yeah, like I said, you sound like my hysterical middle school teacher claiming that Wikipedia will be society’s downfall.
Guess what? It wasn’t. People learn that tools are error prone and came up with strategies to use them while correcting for potential errors.
Like at a fundamental, technical level, components of a system can be error prone, but still be useful overall. Quantum calculations have inherent probabilities and errors in them, but they can still solve some types of calculations so much faster than normal computers that you can run the same calculation 100x on a Quantum Computer, average out the results to remove the outlying errors, and get to the right answer far faster than a classical computer.
Computer chips in satellites and the space station are constantly having random bits of memory flipped by cosmic rays, but they still work fine because their RAM is error-correcting ram, that can use similar methods to verify and check for errors.
And at a super high level, some of my friends and coworkers are more reliable than others, that doesn’t mean the ones that are less reliable aren’t helpful, it just means I have to take what they say with a grain of salt.
Designing for error correction is a thing, and people are perfectly capable of doing so in their personal lives.
Yes, they literally are. Or maybe you haven’t heard of human caused climate change?
But a) they don’t refuse, most will tell you if you prompt them well them and b) you cannot rely on them as the sole source of truth but an information machine can still be useful if it’s right most of the time.
My friends would probably say something like “I’ve never heard that one, but I guess it means something like …”
Ok, but the point is that lots of people would just say something and then figure out if it’s right later.
The problem is, these LLMs don’t give any indication when they’re making stuff up versus when repeating an incontrovertible truth. Lots of people don’t understand the limitations of things like Google’s AI summary* so they will trust these false answers. Harmless here, but often not.
Quite frankly, you sound like middle school teachers being hysterical about Wikipedia being wrong sometimes.
Lmao, the fuckepic and ‘Tim Sweeney is a bastard man’ sentiments were always wildly overblown.
The fact that anyone took Apple’s side in this case (because the Epic game store paid for a couple exclusive games to try and break into the market) is laughably childish.
Apple literally rips off the entire world to the tune of billions of dollars a year through app store mafia extortion fees alone, let alone the rest of their anti-competitive bullshit.
Epic was just trying to break into the Apple / Google / Steam monopolies and made a couple unpopular / anti-consumer business moves on a couple games (all the while taking afar smaller cut of profits than any other store), meanwhile Apple has based their literal entire multi-decade business model on anti-consumer choices and done that for every single hardware and software device they sell you.
They are not remotely comparable. Epic was always fully in the right in their anti-monopoly legal battles.