This is amazing! Thank you so much for doing this!! Would you mind telling me your process for extracting the data from the graph? Did you tediously manually extract eye-balled data-points? Or, did you run it through some software which extracted them? Or, perhaps, did you just find and use the original data source?

I’d like to see a logarithmic version of this graph. Picking out a straight line in a log graph is easier than trying to discern an exponential. I want that juicy exponential.

Not really as those are public things.

Would you mind citing an example of exactly what you are referring to? I feel like I’m presuming a lot of things in your statements here.

Dhcp is more of a issue.

I don’t know if it’s “more”, or “less” of an issue, but all these things are worthy of concern.

That would certainly also be worthy of concern.

have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.

That is a possible solution, though not exactly the most convenient, imo. That is, if I understand you correctly that you are talking about setting the OS timezone to be UTC.

could be defeated by doing an analysis of when the commits were made on average vs other folks from random repositories to find the average time of day and then reversing that information into a time zone

This is the first thing I thought of upon reading the title

It’s also in the post body.

Any given time zone there are going to be millions if not billions of people.

One more bit of identifying information is still one more bit of identifying information.

Git also “leaks” your system username and hostname IIRC by default which might be your real name.

This is only part of a fallback if a username and email is not provided [1].

A fake name and email would pretty much be sufficient to make any “leaked” time zone information irrelevant.

Perhaps only within the context where one is fine with being completely unidentifiable. But this doesn’t consider the circumstance where a user does want their username to be known, but simply don’t want it to be personally identifiable.

UTC seems like it’s just “HEY LOOK AT ME! I’M TRYING TO HIDE SOMETHING!”

This is a fair argument. Ideally, imo, recording dates for commits would be an optional QoL setting rather than a mandatory one. Better yet, if Git simply recorded UTC by default, this would be much less of an issue overall.

if you sleep like most people, could be defeated by doing an analysis of when the commits were made on average vs other folks from random repositories to find the average time of day and then reversing that information into a time zone.

I mentioned this in my post.

It’s better to be “Jimmy Robinson in Houston Texas” than “John Smith in UTC-0”

That decision is contextually dependent.

How do you mean?

Huh. That’s actually kind’ve a clever use case. I hadn’t considered that. I presume the main obstacle would be the token limit of whatever LLM that one is using (presuming that it was an LLM that was used). Analyzing an entire codebase, ofc, depending on the project, would likely require an enormous amount of tokens that an LLM wouldn’t be able to handle, or it would just be prohibitively expensive. To be clear, that’s not to say that I know that such an LLM doesn’t exist — one very well could — but if one doesn’t, then that would be rationale that i would currently stand behind.

Fair point. I think “leak” is likely the wrong term to use here. “Exposes” is probably a better one. I’ll update the post promptly.

The secret to success: survivorship bias.

I’ve played it for a bit, and it’s a decently fun and well-made game! My only gripe is that it requires an email for signup; I wish it would only require a username and password. For most users, though, I’d wager that that’s a pretty minor issue.

Watch for battery life when buying older Surface devices. Replacing batteries in the older Surface Pros is notoriously difficult, because apparently the whole assembly is glued together.

Thank you very much for the heads up!

Newer versions are apparently more repairable, but you’ll have to investigate where that cut-off line of repairability is.

It looks like an attempt at heading in the direction of repairability started with the Surface Pro 9, but it’s still quite involved [1][2].

That’s perfect!

Given that Lemmy’s mascot looks like a mouse (I think it’s technically a lemming), an idea that came to my mind was “cheese day”.

Thank you for pointing out, by example, a flaw in my original title 😆

That’s actually a pretty slick interface. It makes me wonder how many solid apps have been lost to obscurity.

I’ll see if maybe I’ve just misconstrued the over-complexity for my needs.

It depends how you are defining “over-complexity”. FreeCAD is a very capable CAD application, so, by extension, it has a vast array of features which means that a single task could potentially be tackled multiple ways. That being said, it is not a difficult application to use, imo. The UI feels well designed, and it is responsive. Like many things, the level of ease of use, and productivity when using it depends a lot on one’s familiarity with the application.

Thank you for your suggestion!

Would you be able to provide some screenshots of the application? The website for the application doesn’t seem to exist anymore, and the GitHub page doesn’t have any images of the application. I must confess, however, that I’m somewhat hesitant to use an application that is no longer maintained, and isn’t popular enough to provide a large enough chance of good security due to the sheer number of people looking at the source code and using the app. Granted, the latter could be solved by me “simply” looking through the source, but I confess that this doesn’t feel entirely worth it, atm.

+1 for FreeCAD.