personal – Page 6 – The Cat Fox Life

Libre software funding and market abuse

I’ve just read a troubling article from the developer of Aether.

What troubles me is not so much the differences we have, which likely stems from being in vastly different segments of libre software (he’s doing social media, and I’m in low-level systems). What troubles me is that he claims that it is an economic imperative to work at FAANG or a Silicon Valley startup for a number of years before working on libre software full time, and all of this on a false pretense.

Encouraging someone to have a long-term savings and funding plan is a good idea, perhaps even a great idea. It falls apart when he states that working for startups or FAANG are the only or best way you can earn that money — and then claiming that you could make 250,000 USD per month working at them[1]. This is flawed mathematics at best, and actively malicious to society at worst.

Most people are going to have to work at a company before founding their own, unless they have funding from external sources (be it angel investors, VC, inheritance, family and friends, etc). This is not what I take issue with. This issue I have is this false dichotomy that you can only make good money by working at FAANG or an abusive startup. As someone who actually has worked at two different startups in their life, I take personal issue with the way startup culture exploits its workers, investors, and society at large. This doesn’t even go in to how startup culture can also be bad for business.

This abuse is ingrained in to most, if not all, of the industry of Big Tech, ala FAANG. You might be able to wrestle some division of Apple, or the security research division of Netflix, out of this hole and point to them as an example of where I’m wrong. Oh, dear reader — even if you have the privilege of working in an area of the company that isn’t abusing its workers, you’re still complicit in that abuse by furthering the company’s mission and control over some part of the industry at best, and indirectly engaging in it yourself at worst.

It’s time for the computer industry to rise up and work at companies that respect their workers, and society. Quit FAANG like a bad habit, and find a company to work for that doesn’t trade in the abuse of power and users as its main product. And where those don’t yet exist, it’s time to found some. At the end of the day, we are all defined by the actions we take — which side of history do you want to be on?

[1]: And I quote, “If you can make $10,000 a month from donations doing open source work, I can guarantee you that your salary in any large tech company (or even startup) would be much more — to the tune of 10x to 25x.” The firm Indeed claim, at time of writing, that the highest paid research engineers at Google make about 246,000 USD per year; other companies pay even less. That’s 20,500 USD per month, or just about twice the amount he claims you might be able to make on donations doing ‘open source work’. And this doesn’t require you to further Google’s surveillance state.

Thoughts on Konsole 19.04

I write way too many articles that focus on the negatives of my work and of open source projects. To change things up, I’m going to review Konsole’s newest release, 19.04.0.

The first thing I noticed when I opened Konsole 19.04 is that the weird bug with line heights is gone. I can use Liberation Mono again without having a ridiculous amount of space between each line! While I do enjoy using Fira Code in Kate, it doesn’t lend itself very much to being a general purpose terminal font, and that was the only one that gave a reasonable line height in 18.12.

The new profile editor is very nice, and gives a little more control over some tweaks and settings that were previously difficult to find (or even not there, such as margins). There also appear to be more settings about controlling mouse behaviour; I can’t recall if they may have been there before, but they are definitely more accessible and more discoverable now.

The tab bar takes up slightly less vertical room, leaving more for terminal output. Additionally, a Terminal.app-style close button is now present on all tabs by default.

Overall I am very happy with Konsole 19.04 and I look forward to many productive days hacking on code with it!

Speaking with authority

I’ve just spent the better part of three hours arguing on IRC about Let’s Encrypt clients. After speaking with two others, I realised that nobody who I spoke with before knew their facts were facts.

Different people all told me various incorrect information, such as:

No ACME client supports doing a manual DNS TXT record for verification bootstrapping until you have an httpd up. (acme.sh, dehydrated, and certbot all support this.)
LE needs IPv4 for the HTTP challenge. (It worked fine for me with an IPv6-only host. I’m not sure which it would prefer if it had the choice between v6 and v4, or if it’d use Happy Eyeballs and connect to whichever responded first.)
It isn’t possible to step through the process manually as a debugging aid; you have to rely on your ACME client’s debugging facilities. (https://gethttpsforfree.com/ helped a tonne.)
You have to be listening for the HTTP challenge on port 80. (The TLS-ALPN-01 challenge type exists which will only ever use port 443 for the challenge.)
Critique of how I isolated each service on a separate VM so that they would be more secure, saying it was “over-convoluted”.

All of these people spoke with an air of authority. They sounded like they genuinely knew what they were talking about, and were trying to inform me of the limitations of ACME clients / Let’s Encrypt. Nobody actually knew the answer, but they thought they were right because it fit their experience.

When I speak to people about technology, whether in real life, on IRC, or on a mailing list, I always try to make the limitations of my knowledge clear. Many is the time I have said “I’m not sure if you can do that”, or “I don’t know if X supports Y“. And sure, on occasion I will say “I have never done Y and last I knew X couldn’t do that”. Note, however, that all of these are presented as statements from my hive of knowledge, and not presented as plain facts. The art of communication seems to be lost on far too many in the technology field.

There is no shame in not knowing the answer to something. It is certainly more helpful to say “I’m not sure you can do that”, instead of “you can’t do that”. I almost gave up on Let’s Encrypt and wrote another article on how useless it is, because I was told by people who used Let’s Encrypt that it had all of these limitations that made it seem useless, arbitrary, and ridiculous to me. (Thanks to Rich Felker of musl, and Freeyorp, for setting the record straight.)

Maybe we need a new term for this. “Organic FUD”, since it comes from the community itself? At any rate, I hope that in the future, more people note the limitations of their knowledge up-front rather than sounding authoritative about a subject they know little about.

GitHub and IPv6, three years later

Three years ago, I wrote Going IPv6 native without IPv4, which noted all the services I couldn’t access over IPv6. After all this time, there is some good news, and bad news.

First, the good news: BitBucket, Savannah, and Launchpad all support IPv6 now!

Now, the bad news: GitHub still does not. This has actually prevented me from setting up a trial run of acme.sh on a server. The server I was going to test LE on is only connected to the public Internet via IPv6. Yes, I was actually trying to see if Let’s Encrypt has gotten any better, and I was prevented from doing it because GitHub does not support IPv6.

Authors of ACME clients, especially ones that are only available via GitHub: find a mirror that supports IPv6! At this point, now I’m going to have to set up acme.sh on my workstation, and then scp the certificates over to the server every 60 days. Thanks GitHub.