A correct and helpful answer. HA is phenomenal, although some report the learning curve is steep - it’s totally worth it.

I use it with lots of different vendors and it consolidates and coordinates everything between everything else.

Ah yes, the “Right to be forgotten”

You are correct, of course. However, they are well within their rights to not delete your data. Look up “Legitimate interest” - it’s a huge GDPR loophole and widely abused. (Certainly in charity fundraising in which I used to work)

The LI can be for their own business purposes, including profiling, machine learning and of course, advertising.

It can also, and usually is, need to keep data in case they receive a legal order to provide it. In the event of Reddit being used for terrorism purposes (which I’m sure it has, along with every other messaging platform), they will be required to produce that information. Which they can’t if it’s gone.

We wave the GDPR around like it solves all our problems. And whilst it does add a huge amount of public protection and it’s impressive it made it into law given those objecting to it, it does not give you the right to your own data above all else.

Whilst I totally understand your comments and even appreciate them, I still believe I am right.

About four years ago I used NukeReddit - a similar script that loads your comment history, edits each posts, replaces the text with nonsense and saves it. Then deletes the post. I did that because someone got close to identifying me IRL and I didn’t want them to, and wanted to tidy up my own data leakage.

After that, I continued using Reddit until the recent nonsense when I decided to leave to good. First, I used Power Delete, repeating it over several days to delete thousands of comments and hundreds of posts. About a week after that, I submitted a GDPR data request. Another week, I deleted my account. About a week after /that/, I received the GDPR response containing several CSV files containing my data. That included posts and comments I’d made from 11 years ago when I had created that account.

That data had survived two quite thorough scrubs and deletions, and whilst I no longer have access to that account, I believe my data and my account are still there - just unavailable to me.

I do know a little about data and databases, and in many mature projects, deleting posts simply sets an is_deleted column with the date it’s deleted. Editing a message simply creates a copy of that message, sets the original as is_deleted with a date, and sets the copy with the edited text. That’s standard and honestly, I don’t know why Reddit would not do that.

Also consider that Reddit may be under a legal obligation NOT to delete data. If there is a criminal investigation at a later date, they will need to be able to provide that information. “Sorry Mr Government, we deleted Bin Laden’s posts where he incited terrorism to dozens of other suspects” is not going to be received well.

The bottom line is that only Reddit architects will know for certain, but I’d put real money on betting that I’m right.#

You didn’t wipe your comments, you only created a new version. And if you deleted them, it’s only a soft delete. Reddit still holds your data. I proved this by doing a gdpr request and received stuff I’d wiped and deleted four years before.

They probably still have it. I did a gdpr request then overwrote and deleted all my posts. Then deleted my 11 year account. A couple of weeks later I got the request contents, which contained every post, every comment and every DM I ever made. Reddit does not delete when it’s supposed to.

They still have it. I did a gdpr request then overwrote and deleted all my posts. Then deletedy 11 year account. A couple of weeks later I got the request contents, which contained every post, every comment and every DM. Reddit dies not delete when it’s supposed to.

Nice quote - but I don’t think it does hold up as truly as it did in the 80s. There is an unimaginable wealth of systems and design tools available now that were not around then. Even something take for granted like a gui schema designer - hell, even SQL itself wouldn’t be around until almost a decade later, and that was partly designed to simplify database queries. Every step like that has simplified what we do today. Debugging tools are light years ahead of when I was writing C in the early 90s. Debugging then was pretty much “try and compile it and then fix the errors”. Now there’s linters, memory profilers, automatic pipelines and all the rest of that. Much of that is offset by the fact we do far more complicated things than we did, and that those very tools mean there’s a lot more to learn and master beyond the mere language.

I do concede and agree with your last paragraph. Design is more important than implementation, and elegance of code and concept is a timeless beauty. One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is that thinking about coding is often far more productive than actually coding, and too many times I’ve been a busy fool, re-writing and starting over many times because I later found out a better way.

I disagree completely.

Great! It would be a boring world if we all thought alike.

Programming is inherently difficult,

That’s where we differ. I don’t think it is - and I’m not saying that because I think I’m good, it’s because programming is just a different way of thinking - that’s why there’s books like “Zen and the art of computer programming” and “The Tao of programming”. (I haven’t read “No Silver Bullet” but I’ll keep an eye open. I was actually writing code back in 1986 so it might be interesting to compare because I think programming has changed a huge amount in that time)

Not all programming is easy, just as not all of it is hard. The range of this subject is massive, and blanket statements, pro or anti, just don’t cut it when you dig into it.

I’ve heard that a lot, but I think it’s an outdated view.

Programming should be easy, or at least easier. That’s a view shared by everyone who writes and contributes to documentation on all languages and also those who develop the languages as well. (With varying success).

Every damned one of us was a shit coder when we started, that’s part of the process - not least amongst us who are self taught. Yet some go on to do great things and be wonderful coders (including yourself, no doubt).

You had a bad experience, fair enough, but it’s a big brush to tar everyone with. I think everyone should be a programmer. If nothing else it teaches them a little how software actually works and that’s a good thing.

Run the cables more neatly.

Any work-issued device should be used for just work, right? Surely that’s common sense?

Same! HA is a really interesting thing to get into. I moved to it from Domoticz, which is easy to get going but you hit some hard limits after a while.

Bitwarden’s great, and I use it myself. But for a company with groups, “secure” sharing and so on, it just doesn’t compete on the features. But even so, LP’s card is marked for us.

Last film I watched in the cinema was Dumb and Dumber in the early 90s…

(That’s more to do with living rural and not really wanting to spent an hour each way travelling to be disappointed by distracting audiences)

Agree totally. A great project that just works. Love it

My employer users Lastpass, a commercial solution. That hasn’t been a good experience, with downtime, forced re-passwording and worst, having our details stolen from them.

I agree, the parasitic nature of this relationship has been sharpened in the past week and made many of us think more critically of it.

My question is - what happens if several significant FOSS projects change their licence to “Sources must be publically available if repackaged” or even “Cannot be packaged for sale”, specifically to prevent a non-freely available distro profiting from it.

Yes, that distro could fork the software at the point before the new licence is applied, but they they would be responsible for maintaining that fork going forwards, no? And that would take a lot of resources and need it to be called something else.

I moved from Onenote to Joplin, and it’s been faultless. I’m using a free dropbox account for syncing and that works fine too.