toastal
he/him
Underrated language for this space: ATS from the ML family, which has a feeling of what if C met SML/OCaml then graduated.
You get more flexibility for memory safety with linear types over affine types like Rust for preventing double free or use after free-like errors (while be general for any use-X-times problems). Refinement types can enforce bounds. Dependent types + viewtypes can build complex, but zero-cost abstraction for your own code or as wrappers over C libraries to make them safe & pushing checks to the compile phase rather than runtme. On top of that, there are proof-level types/values you can interleave in your code instead of using an auxiliary language like Coq or Agda. Compiling/mapping to C you use a lot of the same tooling of C as well as performance charactistic of C (can opt in/out of GC, unboxed types, can layout the memory, as well as TCO); you also get the stable C ABI over Rust’s general difficult to be used in non-Rust projects.
All this to say you have a language that can operate at the system level, type abstractions that go beyond posterchild Haskell, & a proof language to turn those white papers into proof code right in the project. If it didn’t have a special learning curve, it should be a lot more popular in this space.
If the day comes where I don’t have a choice, I will start carrying a second device with nothing but banking & similar nonsense that prevents my freedom to do what I want with the device I own. OP knows the website experience matter since it not only gets ported to platforms outside the mobile monopoly but sandboxes the banks for spying on your device & asking questions that aren’t their business like if I run an unGoogled ROM. Good thing there was a mass of pushback against Google trying to add attestestion to Chromium ore we’d enjoy the same nonsense on the web too where I’m sure Linux would be block by these goobers.
Website here is awful. Paste is disabled, it’s not optimized for mobile, it’s a PitA to use, & there is literally code to check if the user is running Netscape Navigator 4. The site has a weird encoding that doesn’t allow English punctuation, & to change your email or phone number requires physical documents, ID, & a wait period. The app is poorly coded & doesn’t work if you have root, are running a custom ROM, (& likely if you don’t have Google services)—so I do just use the site. …But if we are being real, I actually always keep cash on me & cash is preferred so while the problem is still relevant, needing the app/site isn’t dire.
What is really missing for my country on the site is QR code scanning for bank-to-bank transfers that a lot of vendors use & to do some bill payment. For instance, while I could set up the electric bill to auto-debit, my internet bill only has QR scan without a physical bank number I could transfer to (& the short list of utilities doesn’t include my net)—so I take a 25-minute bike ride in the heat once a month to pay that bill but I reward myself by getting to swing by the nearby-ish Hong Kong pie bakery to get a treat & a latte to make out-of-the-way trip feel worth it.
When I do have to use the site & since there is no QR code scanning, the workflow is:
- Login (I have a script to block their paste-blocker to use my password manager)
- Create a new recipient which requires a unique name, the account number + their banking service provider, phone or email, and 12-digit SMS 2FA code (no TOTP or FIDO2 option); this process is done on a desktop-only site which is hard to work with
- Confirm that with email
- Go to transfers, select my from account (despite me only having one account & no default preference option), find that user I created, fill in an amount, do another 12-digit 2FA
- Then they want to take a picture of my phone after the transfer for whatever reason reason
This process due to bad UX can take up to 10 minutes if they are not ready. So the tl;dr is to carry cash or hope an ATM is nearby.
I had discussed it with a local & he said there has been more push towards cashless brought on by businesses/government wanting to track everything & tourists demanding their privacy-invasive ‘comforts’ like $BIG_TECH_PAY & $CREDIT_CARD options despite most folks being fine with cash. Cryptocurrency is basically never accepted either.
I went back to xmonad from Sway a while back when I realized color management wasn’t coming to Wayland any time soon.
Maybe Ladybird can step in but I am still pissed that they do all communications overe proprietary services (Discord & Microsoft GitHub) which hurts the openness of the project.
College the art dept ran Macintosh OS X while computer science ran Solaris & Windows (outside of C# this didn’t matter). I had a OS X/Windows dual boot laptop at the time as well as a Windows/Linux (Crunchbang) desktop which let me accomplish everything. Adobe products were pretty easy to pirate at the time, & I was intially annoyed WINE didn’t really work with them, but I worked slowly towards getting skills in the FOSS tools & when Adobe moved to a cloud subscription model I said “fuck ’em”. The tools are certanily good enough if not better if you learn them. The CS stuff was much easier with Linux to get compilers & whatnot. OpenOffice was fine for everything else. Professors were never asshats & cared that you completed the assignment rather than what specific tool for file format you were using so long as there was something they could easily view (such as PDF). If I really needed some dumb app, I could just use the computer lab. I carried around a stateful distro on a USB as well so I could get around the opposite issue of not having my Linux tools at say the library that was all Microsoft.
Outside of classwork, Pidgin+libpurple & a browser covered my use cases.
So happy I sold off my car 8 years ago & haven’t had one since. I can hardly believe how bad things have gotten.
Well I live, operate, & travel around Asia so English is the only European language to know—which I don’t need help with. I use Yandex Translate primarily just to partition my data usage between servers (image search is the only other thing I use Yandex for), but its offerings aren’t quite as broad for languages like Lao & the quality of translations is slightly worse. All of the European languages are basically the same if you squint your ears so it is no surprise the FOSS tools can handle something easy, but Western-centrism in tech isn’t a new thing.
Voice, YouTube, & occassionally Translate (sorry, your FOSS option doesn’t cover non-European languages well) are the Google servers I can’t quite shake. I almost never use the Voice account but when I do, it’s some required voice call from a US number for a bank or similar—which is very important, to make these calls, but it is so infrequent that I can’t justify paying for an entire service for 1–2 (usually very long) calls annually.
