There was an early product named Rewind.ai (they have pivoted to Limitless Pin) which did essentially the same, I used it frequently - it essentially browser history but for everything you do on your computer, and you’ll get just about the same value as that.
We’re not normies, so take that with a grain of salt. Here’s mine: apps have access to significantly expanded capabilities which has privacy implications. If I can use the browser for a given app, I do it. Amazon for example.
As a native app writer, this has been my experience.
Mentioning it here, though, tends to get pushback from folks that write Web apps. They don’t want to admit that native apps have more capabilities than Web apps; even if that’s a bad thing, because of security risks.
Per their docs they have both “account” tokens and role-based tokens; the former have wide latitude (and might be used for DNS or root-access type stuff), while the latter are intended to be used for maintenance and have strong security boundaries. OP gave access to the former type without realizing it.
In most orgs, those would be behind some escalation control. Unless the token creator didn’t know what they were doing/creating, which tracks for a non-expert.
I usually treat an app putting stuff into $HOME with no reason to change that as a reason to not use the app. I've genuinely switched software multiple times because of the old one doing this.
I also suggest you try xdg-ninja, which automatically scans your home directory and shows which of those directories you can change to a different location:
Stick all the stuff you manually care about into `~/home/` (or some other directory of your choice, e.g. `~/a/` for easy typing). Leave `~/` for the various programs to dump config files in.
On my Mac, there are 94 items in my home directory. 10 of them are expected, coming from either the user template or from single user installations of applications.
Two of the additions are not hidden: go and quicklisp. I don't actually mind this. Hidden folders are stupid if I am expected to be navigating into them either in the GUI or in the CLI. Slightly annoying since there's a perfectly good Library folder they could have dumped themselves in instead but whatever. At least I can see them without unhiding hidden files.
The rest? The other EIGHTY FUCKING TWO items in "my home"?? Hidden dot file BULLSHIT.
11 for Zsh related bullshit. Eleven! Are you fucking serious?
.wget-hsts? What the fuck is even that? Fuck off!
What absolute slop! What an incredibly stupid and shitty way to create caches and configurations. Braindead. I feel like im taking crazy pills. I'm gobsmacked that every time I look into "can I move this dogshit" I find a GitHub issue where the devs seem taken aback and confused "why would you want to do that". Eat shit! What do you mean the plaintext json files we put your config into and never built a GUI for should go into a folder you can see and navigate too easily? Whaaaat?? What do you mean "$XDG_CONFIG" exists? Hmmm no, checking for that would take 5 lines of code so no. Also, assholes, macOS doesn't canonically use goddamn XDG environment variables. Just because it uses a terminal you recognize doesn't mean it's fucking Linux! Take your .config and .cache and .local shite out of here.
And I've tried to fight it, but eventually you give up. It's a losing battle against tasteless patterns and asshole, careless developers. 150 something versions of Firefox and only recently could you move .mozilla. OpenSSH will never not pollute your home directory, they said so!
My desktop is now my home directory. It's mine. My terminal starts up there. Folders of stuff I actually give a fuck about go there. My browsers download into ~/Desktop/Downloads. I'm done fighting. My home was trashed. Crimes occurred. So I moved.
God I fucking hate dotfiles.
EDIT: Oh yeah, my favorite part is that on macOS, the Desktop folder is protected by TCC, so I can easily tell if some background app or something is trying to access it and deny it right then and there. It's a far safer place to keep things like AWS keys and secrets and my SSH keys, but NNoOOoOoOOoO that goes in my home folder that has nothing but POSIX file system level permissions. But don't worry, it's hidden by default! No one will know its there! At least the AWS cli lets you point somewhere else but that comes with a bunch of extra friction.
Apps require full disk access to read my Safari cookie jar database, but they can grab my SSH keys without any issue. Great system we got here! .stupid .bozo .bullshit
Given that most software hides dot files by default, where do you see them so often?
The only place I've encountered where they are visible by default and do get in the way is bash filename completion, and you can change this via the readline config file:
> Given that most software hides dot files by default, where do you see them so often?
I see them when I have to show unhidden files to find some massively bloated folder taking up space or go and manually modify any of the files in those hidden folders, which is quite often! Is it not unexpected to want to navigate to my configuration files? Why is .config hidden? Why not just put it in a folder called "Appropriate-Synonym-For-Stuff-You-Are-Unlikely-To-Want-To-See-Daily/config" I get you're trying to be helpful, but I know that I can hide them and they are hidden by default. The problem is not seeing them. It's that there are 94 top level items in "my" home directory and I'd rather there not be, and yet, I am doomed to suffer this, and I can't most of it because most apps do a piss-poor job of following XDG basedir standards or incorrectly apply them to platforms where they are absolutely not a valid or even sensible specification, and just lazily hardcode their code to pile shit into $HOME/.fucking_garbage.
It is a beyond stupid convention that a . automatically hides a file or folder. It is my computer. Files should always be visible in the GUI or in the terminal. If they should not be for convenience, then that is enough of a "type" or "classification" of a file to group them all together and collapse all that clutter into a folder that is still visible, and easily browsable without switching modes in my graphical file browser or having to add extra flags to commands and what not. Otherwise, the only person who should be hiding anything on my computer is me, via a file system flag (chflags first appeared in BSD 4.4, non-existent on Linux) or manually in the file manager GUI.
I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that.
None of that shit should live in .local. I have a "local" already, it's called ~/Library. There's a Caches folder in there. Also a Preferences folder.
At the very least why make local a dot-folder? Why add the extra keystroke? Local? Local to what?! Of course it's "local" it's my fucking home folder, everything in it is "local" to me. It's redundant. It just further supports that the convention is stupid.
Even when I'm on my Linux computers, where it is at least a half-assed convention, I still hate this crap. The XDG directories and hierarchy are bad and dumb. None of them should be "dot" anything. Hiding clutter under a dot is like hiding clutter in your house under a rug. It's not organization, you just have a big mess you don't have to look at but you have to step around all the time. NeXT solved this shit 30+ years ago and they cleaned it up 25 years ago. You put it in a box (~/Library) with a clean label of a proper noun (Preferences, Caches, Keychains, Extensions, etc) that identifies it, stow it somewhere out of the way but accessible, so you can find it when you need it but otherwise not have to look at it. 84 little dot folders could all be swept out of sight by moving them into the Library, one single folder in my home, but instead, they just sit under a big dot rug in the middle of it.
Apple does commit one sin here and that is hiding the user Library folder by default, but that is part of making computers work for mere mortals as dumb users will go and delete their Library folder to save space and break shit, but that uses a proper file system flag not this crappy convention from half a century ago that breaks sorting.
All that said, I do agree that at the very least Linux apps should be following $XDG_CONFIG and only if unset, pollute the home folder. It's a fucking if-then-else. No excuse. I shouldn't be seeing shit like ".arduinoIDE" or ".claude" Claude should be able to add this feature on its own anyways.
> I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that.
XDG has nothing to do with X11. XDG stands for "Cross-Desktop Group," and is designed specifically for any Unix or Unix-like operating system, which includes macOS.
XDG stands for X Desktop Group. It absolutely does not stand for Cross Desktop Group and has nothing to do with macOS or Windows, outside of aforementioned X apps on Quartz via XQuartz which as far as I know is completely dead.
the successor to xdg, freedesktop.org, however is acknowledging the need for cross platform openness. that's exactly why you indeed can configure where the three main "stores" of compliant applications, their config, their data and their caches.
you can point them to %APPDATA%..., ~/Library or the Linux defaults.
my point in this is: there are free and open conventions and we wouldn't need this "my HOME is cluttered" fuss, if technical teams would embrace them.
so why don't they respect XDG_ env vars for their config and data?
That is a backronym[1], it absolutely meant X Desktop Group and likely changed to "Cross Desktop Group" when they switched to Wayland. D-Bus, .desktop files, MPRIS are all listed as FDO specifications alongside the Desktop basedir spec and none of them are appropriate for macOS either.
FDO applies to Linux and "Unix-Like" Operating Systems. macOS is not "UNIX-like", Apple still bothers to get it certified under UNIX 2003 so it is technically not a Unix-like. Again, just because it has a /usr folder and a /var folder and can run a bash shell out of the box doesn't mean all the same mostly just OK standards from Linux should be copy-pasted over.
This is the most interesting idea imo; do you think it’s testable? For example: allow the installed app to persist, turn on notifications, do some stuff to let a queue drain. Then remove.
Hey, I’m with you - I think social media needs to die specifically for this reason. I’m reminded of the term “snake oil” - it’s like the dawn of newspapers again.
I dislike the “brainwashed” comment from sibling, I believe it makes some assumptions. There aren’t any doubts that:
- AI is extremely resource intensive, consuming electricity, water, silicon, etc at levels possibly never seen before in humanity’s history; whether that’s a waste or not is subjective
- Massive datacenters are popping up like anthills, and coupled with R-flavored regulation rollback there is a definite risk for environmental impact - just like during our last industrialization push where we poisoned much of the country, leading to a massive rollout of environmental protections in the 1970s and 1980s
- Students are taking advantage of LLMs to shirk school responsibilities. Whether this is damaging or not is subjective until proven, and AI may not be causal here (students may not have been getting the expected value from their education without LLMs, again remains to be proven)
- Many companies have used AI as a justification for layoffs, who knows what’s actually true though. There is a very real fear across society that it will continue to impact jobs, and senior AI company leaders are fueling this with public predictions of massive labor shifts. Again, maybe they are lying, but can you blame anyone for worrying?
There are counterarguments to all of these, but dismissing the fear as uneducated or brainwashed reveals your own priors and ignores all of these facts. It’s healthy to ingest OP’s criticisms - especially on a form populated most by Smart People (tm).
I think you’re right. In a very narrow, short term scope. That’s the issue.
The problem with this argument is that assumes the world is static. When trains were invented, they polluted a LOT. Technology evolved. Looking backwards, the amount of value unlocked by them outweighed by order of magnitude the short term pollution they generated. Inefficient in the short term. Generation changing over the longer horizon. Extend the timeframe of your argument. Do you think it holds 20 years from now when we have more efficient algorithms and energy generation technologies? I don’t think so.
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