TFA has a point that it should never have happened, and that CF software engineering practices are likely to blame.

But a BCNF (or 5NF or whatever) database without nullable columns wouldn't have prevented it. Formally verified code might have but that remains a pipe dream for any significant code base.

The proposed cure is worse than the disease.

Haunting images. Plenty of blind spots today that might be looked back on similarly.

Yup, we've all been cornered at a party by that dude, the one who has all these great contrarian ideas he got from reading books. And listening to podcasts. And reading blog posts like this one.

Reading books is an excellent idea. Reading books for the reasons in this blog post is a terrible idea.

Yeah, MPESA was and is still an incredible product. A real lightning-in-a-bottle moment. Even if they've struggled to replicate that success in other geos, the original vision and execution back in the 200x's is a textbook case that bears study.

The npm ecosystem's approach to supply chain security is criminally negligent. For the critical infrastructure that underpins the largest attack surface on the Internet you would think that this stuff would be priority zero. But nope, it's failing in ways that are predictable and were indeed predicted years ago. I'm not closely involved enough with the npm community to suggest what the next steps should be but something has to change, and soon.

> we’ve eliminated resilience wherever we could, because it’s more cost-effective. Resilience is expensive.

You are right. But alas, a peek at the AMZN stock ticker suggests that the market doesn't really value resilience that much.

Stocks stopped being indicative of anything decades ago though.

Echoing a lot of users ITT, Windows has been good to me but the enshittification has reached what feels like the end point.

Windows value to me was "everything just worked". But that's no longer the case now, unless you are willing to walk down Microsoft's centralized rails. Need an MS Account and OneDrive... need expensive modern hardware... get ads and crapware... get telemetry and data exfiltration. The effort of working around all that is non trivial. EDIT: and if I was ok with all that stuff I'd already by captured by Apple.

If I have to fuck around with something in my home OS, that OS might as well be Linux. So now I am compiling wifi and printer drivers from github (FFS Linux!) instead of disabling telemetry and hacking an install with local accounts only.

The challenge, as always, is going to be taking the family with me.

Sounds about right.

These kids have been on camera since they were in the womb. The delivery had a pro videographer. Parents had baby monitors with a video feed, later a nanny cam. Schools had cameras in the classrooms and busses from before first grade. Higher grades onwards all their peers had smartphones and social media accounts.

Some middle aged dude who doesn't want to be on video makes no sense to them, like that weird uncle of yours who in 2010 had no phone or email address.

TFA doesn't make it clear to me how the line is drawn from "bunch of mates playing a pro-sports seasonal drafting game and spice it up with a buy-in pot" to "you sit alone in front of an online skinner box and lose money on opaque spot wagers on ongoing pro sports events".

One thing is very different from the other.

>> ...summarize these rules into one sentence, it’d be: >> Prefer global UI consistency over local optimizations.

I weep for our field, because this should be true beyond the confines of each app.

Instead even on the desktop we have hoards of local "optimisations" - one in each bloated Electron POS.

There's a place for novelty UI - entertainment.

Productivity should have no place for it.

I think the only place left for consistency are Emacs, TUI (but 256 colors and 24 bit enthusiasts are encroaching that), desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.

The most sensible approach is one by mpv. Ship the core logic of your app in a bundle/library. And everyone can build the environment specific UI for that.