Kind of like math, huh? Some people burn out on "meaningless" impossible problems. Others get obsessed with them and make significant contributions along the way to failure.
I'm glad that I'm over that phase I had in university where I wanted to write a custom memory allocator for everything because "I understand my usage better". I will admit that it was a good bit of fun though.
How do push notifications and similar things work on GraphenOS? Do they work reliably out of the box on most apps, or did you have to set up MicroG/whatever GrapheneOS's equivalent is?
> How do push notifications and similar things work on GraphenOS?
Some apps require Google's FCM for push notifications. You need to install Sandboxed Google Play services from the GrapheneOS App Store and grant them unrestricted battery access (so they can run in the background, which is required for maintaining a network connection to FCM and delivering notifications). https://grapheneos.org/faq#notifications
Other apps like Signal use their own background connections, for example WebSockets, to deliver push notifications, but keeping a connection open for each app consumes more battery life than just having one background network connection. Also, not every app supports this.
For Signal specifically, the GrapheneOS project recommends either using FCM via Sandboxed Google Play, or installing Molly (https://molly.im/), a fork of the Signal client for Android, which makes some changes to reduce battery consumption when using WebSocket-based notifications. It also allows you to use UnifiedPush (https://unifiedpush.org/) for notifications instead, but that requires an application called mollysocket (https://github.com/mollyim/mollysocket) running on a server.
Push notifications work on GrapheneOS whether apps do it themselves, use UnifiedPush with the user's choice of provider or use FCM. UnifiedPush and FCM are a more efficient design where apps share a push connection. Unfortunately, many apps only support FCM and some support their own push as a fallback, but few support UnifiedPush. FCM works very well via sandboxed Google Play, which is an approach where Google apps can be installed as regular sandboxed apps with zero special access or privileges. Nothing FCM does actually requires special privileges and our compatibility layer makes it work without it.
GrapheneOS does not include sandboxed Google Play but rather includes an open source compatibility layer providing support for installing Google Play as regular sandboxed apps. They can't do or access anything more than other apps including the Google Play code running inside apps using Google Play which is the reason for choosing this design. It simply uses the same app sandbox and permission model which are both greatly improved by GrapheneOS for supporting running the rest of Google Play not bundled with apps using it.
Worth noting apps don't need Google Play services to use Google services and many Google libraries like Ads and Analytics work without it. FCM requires Google Play services but many of their libraries do. There are Lite variants of Ads and Analytics for keeping apps smaller which lose the ability work without Google Play services. The general reason for the design is they don't want to have huge apps and want to be able to update the clients for their services without app developers doing it and shipping an app update. FCM is one of the special cases requiring the central design for efficiency. UnifiedPush is an alternative with choice of implementation / provider.
Everything works out of the box, and it doesn't use a third party layer like MicroG. The difference is that Google's apps/services are not given admin privileges like they usually are, so you can selectively enable or disable things.
For example, installing an app on Google Play works like F-Droid. Once the download finishes, you have to open the Play store app to trigger a system dialog to accept the installation. On other Android devices, GPlay can install apps without your approval.
Written in an attempt to wrangle my own thoughts about AI, the current and future state of software engineering: My ramblings about AI and software engineering.
Really, thoughtful and balanced write up. Striking a balance between keeping skills like reviewing and writing well structured code and using the black box to do for it or help speed you up is to going to be hard to strike. Then again, we have gone through similar shifts before e.g. LSP, search engines, stack overflow, etc.
I don't know, I suppose that as things change, they tend to remain the same in a strange way. Definitely, a disorienting time to be a software engineer right now. Even more so for new grad devs.
As someone who hasn't been a professional for too long, I'm curious. Did the general tone of tools in software engineering ever feel like this before? Where we're talking about replacing engineers instead of assisting them? I learned to code LSPs and stack overflow. I didn't get to experience them being integrated into a developers wirkflow.
Here are some data points specific on IT. Back from 2023 until more recently, although as I said there is an uptick for 2025. For general statistics I like:
https://tradingeconomics.com/
"..The sector's share of Polish GDP and the value of exports per employee increased significantly despite the fact that at the same time the growth rate of employment slowed down. And while these changes were anticipated, this is a new situation. Until now, all three indicators have been correlated quite strongly.." - https://absl.pl/en/news/p/new-phase-growth-modern-business-s...
I feel terrible because I never did anything wrong. I never went to a concert. I never worked around loud things for prolonged periods. I never listened to music too loud. I have tinnitus. It seems to go up in intensity when my TMD acts up, but it never goes completely away.
Mine isn't nearly debilitating, but I worry that it's going to get worse with time.
I wonder about a genetic component. I've had the "sound of silence" for as long as I can remember. I don't remember how old she was, exactly, but my daughter confirmed she was experiencing something similar at a pretty young age (under 5 y/o). We were always very careful with her hearing (to the point that we had very small earmuffs we'd have her wear in potentially loud situations), so I don't think it's the result of physical damage.
I'm sitting alone in a quiet room typing this and I've got a cacophony of >12kHz whine going in both ears. The left is slightly louder and lower than the right. It's not debilitating but it would be really neat to hear actual silence once in awhile.
I played w/ doing hearing range tests on myself and my friends using an old NEC V20-based laptop during my high school days (mid-90s). I wrote a little BASIC program that played sounds of increasing frequency and asked you to report if you could hear the sound. Sometimes it indicates it's playing a sound when it isn't. By playing (or not playing) sounds repeatedly I would build up a "score" for the user's high frequency hearing response.
I have notes showing I could hear between 16 and 17 kHz back then. Today I struggle to hear more than 12 kHz. Interestingly, my tinnitus presents frequencies high than I can actually hear now.
I've had tinnitus since my teen years, half a century ago. At least, what I normally hear is, I assume, tinnitus, but it comes in two forms. There's a constant sort-of grey noise, not too loud (definitely softer than people talking in the same room), which wavers in amplitude over a sub-second period. The more annoying form is a pretty pure sine wave, much louder, which thankfully is more infrequent. Not really sure if that quieter form is something everyone gets, or an actual tinnitus form. Anyway, after 50+ years, it's not a big deal to me.
I'm in the same boat for the most part. Always had tinnitus, for as long as I can remember. Doesn't bother me at all.
However, for the past 3 or 4 years, during spring, I get much worse tinnitus in my right ear for a couple weeks. It appears to be caused by some kind of blockage in my inner ear due to the inevitable viruses we catch during the winter. It's louder and a lower pitch (around 3 kHz, unlike my 10+ kHz normal one), and even though it's not the first time this happens by now, it's still extremely annoying. It's harder to just ignore, and my mind immediately starts thinking "what if this lasts forever?"
So I can imagine that for those who develop tinnitus at adulthood, it can cause a lot more distress, because they lived the "before".
Its the same for me. Its always been there. I've also done a lot of activities over my life that make it worse, like playing the drums, attending very loud electronic music parties, and motorcycling without earplugs. It's just a low-level background sound that is part of my life, and I'm lucky enough to be able to tune it out most times. But reading this post and going through this thread has made it a lot worse.
Interestingly, my five-year-old was complaining about ringing in her ears being distracting at bed time, so I wonder if it is genetic too.
Same for me, is it weird I'd go so far as to say... I like mine? I like the name "the sound of silence" for it - I kinda feel like I use it as a "plane" to think on top of somehow or something. For me it kinda...whirrs up almost, till I'm fully enveloped by my thoughts and imagination, at that point the tinnitus is gone and I'm in unbridled thinking mode,I quite like the whole experience personally. I'm scared it will get debilitating like others have described, but it's never bothered me.
I have tinnitus from an inner ear injury from snorkeling/free diving. Tinnitus can be caused by clenching your jaw or otherwise stimulating your jaw muscles. My ENT told me the nerves for the muscles are extremely close to the nerves for hearing. One thing I try when my tinnitus acts up is making sure to keep my jaw relaxed.
I've started wearing a night guard/TMJ splint, by the recommendation of a dentist. It helps a lot in preventing my jaw from locking up during the day. Have you given that a show to try and alleviate some pressure from the area?
you could have gotten tinnitus from medication. some medications (quite a few of the stronger antibiotics) are known as being ototoxic. my tinnitus started while taking antibiotics for a bad infection. I cant prove it was my antibiotic, but the antibiotic was ototoxic
I think this is the cause of mine. An audiologist said my actual hearing is remarkable and recommended protecting it, so I don't think it's hearing loss.
In my twenties, I was slowly developing tinnitus, it was driving me nuts.
I work with computers a lot and my spine was paying a price. In my late twenties I started working out and doing yoga and later pilates to strengthen my back and straighten my spine. My tinnitus went away. Something was being pinched in my neck, causing the tinnitus.
I'm not sure this is your problem, but it might help someone out there.
I have noticed that my traps and everything around it feel a lot better when I work out. Hopefully I can continue to work out, despite recent minor injuries.
I'm someone who is building a messaging app, and I make sure we subscribe to the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" philosophy. But in our case it's collect nothing so there's no data to steal even if we get hacked.
I just got started working Zod into a new project. This could not have happened at a better time. I would have needed to change so much ot migrate to v4 based on what I'm seeing.
