I don’t get the term ‘technical debt’. Most people seem to use it to say “We took shortcuts previously, so now we need to go back and do things properly”.

FIrst, it’s a bad metaphor. You take on debt to invest in long term things that will provide future benefits. Telling the bean counters that you need to stop working on useful features to ‘pay back technical debt’ is not making things clearer to them.

Second, you write software, what the heck are you talking about? Compare to civil engineering. If an area gets busier and the existing narrow wood bridge is no longer suitible, engineers don’t say “Wow what idiots built this road with no eye to future growth?” It was built with the needs and resources of the time. To improve it, the bridge needs to be closed, demolished, and rebuilt with planning, labour and materials.

Instead software is empherial. You don’t need to demolish what’s there. No need to build temporary alternative infrastructure. No need for new materials and disposal of the old. It’s just planning and labour to redo a piece of software. It always seems so whiny when people complain about technical debt, as if switching to a different build system is anywhere close to the difficulty of fixing real life; replacing lead pipes with copper for an entire city, or removing asbestos from buildings.

I’ve always just wiped my work laptop and installed Linux.

That’s the fantasy. It’s full of politics and informal power structures though.

Well yeah, Hopoo sold the RoR franchise to gearbox 2 years ago.

Moving from a small indie studio to Valve they are giving up a lot of agency.

They’re still at it, they bought Campo Santo (Firewatch Devs) in 2018 and now their game In The Valley of Gods is never gonna happen, they worked on Alyx instead.

They poached a bunch of folks from Hopoo Games recently too.

Another aspect is the social graph. It’s targeted for normies to easily switch to.

Very few people want to install a communication app, open the compose screen for the first time, and be met by an empty list of who they can communicate with.

https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

By using phone numbers, you can message your friends without needing to have them all register usernames and tell them to you. It also means Signal doesn’t need to keep a copy of your contact list on their servers, everyone has their local contact list.

This means private messages for loads of people, their goal.

Hey, we know this account sent this message and you have to give us everything you have about this account

It’s a bit backwards, since your account is your phone number, the agency would be asking “give us everything you have from this number”. They’ve already IDed you at that point.

ZFS doesn’t have fsck because it already does the equivalent during import, reads and scrubs. Since it’s CoW and transaction based, it can rollback to a good state after power loss. So not only does it automatically check and fix things, it’s less likely to have a problem from power loss in the first place. I’ve used it on a home NAS for 10 years, survived many power outages without a UPS. Of course things can go terribly wrong and you end up with an unrecoverable dataset, and a UPS isn’t a bad idea for any computer if you want reliability.

Totally agree about mainline kernel inclusion, just makes everything easier and ZFS will always be a weird add-on in Linux.

The only problem I run into is sites that use Bluetooth or USB APIs to talk to a local device. Both Firefox and Safari don’t implement them due to security concerns.

My partner worked for a local council. They reset your password every 90 days which prevented you from logging in via the VPN remotely. To fix it you’d call IT and they’ll demand you tell them your current password and new password so they can change it themselves on your behalf.

Even worse, requesting a work iphone meant filling out an IT support ticket. So that IT could set up your phone for you, the ticket demanded your work domain username and password, along with your personal apple account username and password.

It was meant in jest, I should have contrasted plain text / cipher text to be more clear. Though it’s a similar kind of extenstion to email technology that they are advocating against.

These folks want to read their emails in their terminal email client, and for you to cater to their limitations. If you use tuta and send them an email, tuta just emails them a link to view the message on tuta’s webapp. I’d say this anti-HTML group aren’t fans of that.

Not to argue semantics, but I would consider encryption in general is a change in message formatting. The client needs to change how the bytes are interpreted. It adds complexity, and clients may not support it, their exact arguments against HTML.

To be fair, these folks are advocating for plain text emails, not surprising they are against encrypted emails.