I have a side project where, for some years now, I've supported an app built using F# with Xamarin.Forms and the Fabulous MVU framework. Before .NET 6, things were generally pretty great, and I thought this was an impressive achievement considering how many moving parts the combination of .NET with F# + Xamarin + Fabulous entails.
As .NET 6 and MAUI started to come on the scene, stuff went haywire pretty badly, tooling issues like breakpoints in Visual Studio no longer working in my projects, obscure build errors, confusing build warnings, dependency hell particularly with Xamarin.Android NuGet packages and Xamarin.Essentials. I'm still not up to date with all NuGet packages because doing so breaks my app at runtime. I'm in this halfway point in regards to use of the PackageReference project type. Things haven't been smooth lately for F# and Fabulous projects.
Things are slowly getting better though, and I would say that my experience is probably not entirely typical due to the inclusion of Xamarin, which introduces a whole additional layer of crazy. I think if you were to use F# for backend web services for example, then your experience would probably be a great deal more palatable than mine. I don't think F# is stagnating or dying by any means, but I do feel that it is still a second class citizen to C#. I hope MS continues to work towards this not being the case, because with all the "batteries included" of .NET behind it, I think F# is a great functional-first language.
> I've seen people report that they have reduced spam to near nothing already with just a honeypot, but of course I can't verify those claims.
Can verify from personal experience. I once implemented a simple honeypot approach on a small blog site. It immediately cut down automated "drive by" comment spam to almost nothing. I never tried to quantify it, but it was the difference between dozens of spam comments a day and maybe one or two a week (which I assumed were probably manual submissions).
Most spam bots are pretty unsophisticated it seems, and do not pay any attention to a honeypot field being hidden either by CSS or JS.
I remember watching that segment and thought it was a great illustration of the problem of people not truly caring about their privacy unless given a highly visceral and easy to understand explanation. The thing is though, even this kind of explanation doesn't seem to stick over time.
The Fappening should have triggered that type of reaction. It didn't. Because it wasn't the average person who got snooped on, just celebrities. And people love looking at celebrities, nude and otherwise.
It's not the touchpad that annoys me, it's the fact that I generally seem to have to enter the address in the most non-intuitive order for it to find anything, e.g. first postcode, then street name, then street number.
My car absolutely uses the break when required to maintain the set cruise control speed, I've watched it happen. The car I owned before my current car didn't use the break to keep to the set cruise control speed though, so I get why you may think there is no break involved. It largely seems to depend on make and cost of the car you're driving.
Our Passat uses brakes for cruise control, our older Kia Ceed did not. I actually hate when it uses the brake. The non-brake method is much better imo. Feels like such a waste to heat the brakes on a steep incline instead of just rolling with it.
Yeah true. Seems like the more feature complete assistance systems are making their way down to even some of the more low-end brands these days. Level 1 autonomy is getting pretty old hat now I guess.
> turns out when you crush the competition with the world's best logistics technology you end up with a whole bunch of systems from the 70s/80s that are hard to update.
I hear Walmart makes much use of AS2. A means of transmission that I have had a lot of exposure to over the last few months (and absolutely no exposure to before this). While I think there were definitely some forward looking aspects to AS2, it's relative obscurity outside of very specific verticals and the fact that seemingly every COTS platform that implements it is overpriced and many years or even decades old (and feels like it) has not made my AS2 journey very pleasant to date.
So I just wanted to say: my condolences to you. :P
I remember watching the first few episodes and Elliot is doing one of his monologues about the technology he uses and his hacking activities and I was like hold on! That all mostly made sense! What's going on here? :)
I know the feeling. I'm relatively lucky in that I live somewhere that has had VDSL for some time and my download speed is adequate, if not ideal. But my upload speed is atrocious, in fact actually slower now than it was in past years (before my ISP got bought out by a bigger ISP) and my ISP will not guarantee any particular upload speed for my connection. I make use of a cloud-based backup service to mitigate the possibility of local disk failure and it's just painful.
You hardly hear anyone talking about upload speeds in Australia. It's as if cloud-based services aren't really a thing and we're back in the early 2000s.
> That Australia didn't end up with a future proof fibre to the home system given the amount of money spent is an absolute disgrace. I get angry every time I have to discuss it.
I know this feeling as well. :) It is a massive lost opportunity that the country will be paying for in more ways than one for decades to come.
It's not that cut and dry for me. I do see objective differences in the Microsoft of today.
* Visual Studio Community is now free.
* Visual Studio Code is free and surprisingly awesome, IMO. It's now my default text editor, having replaced Sublime Text.
* I think what they're doing with .NET Core, VS Code etc. is great, they've realised after completely missing the boat on mobile that they can't control all the platforms anymore, they've been forced to think cross-platform. They've been forced to think beyond Windows for the first time in their history really, and that's a good thing.
* Their traditional allergic reaction to anything open source seems to have been given a strong dose of antihistamines. They've open sourced a bunch of their own stuff and they're now #1 for open source contributions on GitHub.
* I like Azure, I like that they're making their own hardware - I used a Surface Pro 4 as my main machine for a while and it was pretty good, "devices and services" as Nadella has said.
Bear in mind that I hated Microsoft back in the day. I only ever begrudgingly used Windows, I stayed well away from any of their development tools, preferring open source languages and frameworks even when working on top of Windows. If I needed to run a server, it was Debian (this is still more or less the case for me today). I used to run Debian as my main desktop OS for a few years. Today a Mac is still my main machine. I say this because I want it to be clear that I'm coming at this topic from a place well outside the world of Microsoft. I am well acquainted with the alternatives.
Besides Ballmer, there has been a generational change at Microsoft. Is the publicity around this change somewhat marketing driven? is there still plenty of room for improvement? Sure, no doubt. But I think it's a bit disingenuous and overly cynical to 100% attribute it all to marketing/PR spin.
Windows 10 and so on. Yeah I know, I get it and it's not OK. They're obviously not alone in the exploitation of their user's data, however. I say that not as some kind of equivalence-based excuse but because it's a problem involving multiple organisations and industries. And while my main point is that Microsoft has - in some ways - changed for the better, in most cases, at the end of the day, the nature of a public company will always be to make profit measured in quarterly periods. And much like the proverbial scorpion (and frog), a public company will keep trying to make profit measured in quarterly periods to the potential detriment of its own long term viability and that of the greater societal context within which it exists. My point here being I don't think it's realistic to expect that anything other than external pressure will change the privacy situation you highlight.
And when the majority doesn't seem to care about loss of privacy unless maybe it's about their dick pics[1], I think you're right in that the privacy situation as it currently stands is not going anywhere.
Perhaps a little more on topic, the HR practices of Microsoft may have improved somewhat, but I have some acquaintances that work there and it's still not all roses in that area either from what I hear.
So I can commend Microsoft for what they're doing better while still recognising where they suck. It doesn't have to be a binary all or nothing situation. At least not for me. It ceased being a religious war for me a long time ago.
As .NET 6 and MAUI started to come on the scene, stuff went haywire pretty badly, tooling issues like breakpoints in Visual Studio no longer working in my projects, obscure build errors, confusing build warnings, dependency hell particularly with Xamarin.Android NuGet packages and Xamarin.Essentials. I'm still not up to date with all NuGet packages because doing so breaks my app at runtime. I'm in this halfway point in regards to use of the PackageReference project type. Things haven't been smooth lately for F# and Fabulous projects.
Things are slowly getting better though, and I would say that my experience is probably not entirely typical due to the inclusion of Xamarin, which introduces a whole additional layer of crazy. I think if you were to use F# for backend web services for example, then your experience would probably be a great deal more palatable than mine. I don't think F# is stagnating or dying by any means, but I do feel that it is still a second class citizen to C#. I hope MS continues to work towards this not being the case, because with all the "batteries included" of .NET behind it, I think F# is a great functional-first language.