I've noticed this – I'm a former software engineer, now a full-time priest. It's been fascinating to reflect on how the base of my analogies has shifted from software/tech to theology/the Christian tradition. Not entirely though, there are many times when I've found resonances in between.
One extension I'd make from your comment is how rich interdisciplinary work can be, because all the resonances between different fields can come to life and some really wonderful creativity happens.
I hope that the next big shift will be to undo the asymmetry that crept into the internet quickly after it first became popular. Let us host stuff at home. Let us run odd and strange and great systems wherever we are. Undo the cloud, undo the capture of the net – I'm old enough to remember when we just had a bunch of boxen under a desk somewhere, and it was pretty great.
> Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers."
I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?
I recently set up passkey-only sign ins for a webapp I'm writing using Authentik [0](Python OIDC provider, with quite a nice docker-compose run-up, took only minutes to stand up.) It was surprisingly easy to configure everything so that passkeys are the only thing ever used.
If anyone would be interested I could write it up? I was surprised what a nice user flow it is and how easy it was to achieve.
I ran into one of these in the very early 00s; was working at a university (back in the days when a couple of people would run all the central servers, running Linux on beige PCs.) We had some anti-spam/AV software that looked at every incoming email hooked into Postfix, and the server kept running out of disk space.
Eventually tracked it down to an email which contained a zip of stock trading data – just the three letter stock code and the shift. It wasn't malicious, it just had an extraordinarily high compression ratio!
A friend had a book she'd written in a Mac version of word from the early 90s; none of the current Microsoft versions of Word (windows, mac, web) would read it, but Libreoffice worked fine, so a little script later using Libreoffice's CLI tools and it was all converted, pretty much intact.
There's still a dearth of support in commonly used open source backend frameworks, too – and, at least after looking a bit the other day, I couldn't find much in the way of documentation on the standard flows. I was hindered a little in searching by SEO spam from various companies offering APIs to deal with users/passkeys for me as a service.
Yep – I've been using Django since 2007. The big win used to be the admin, ORM, database migrations... but now oddly enough a lot of that has become a pain. I'm someone who knocks small solutions together for fun or to scratch and itch, so I'm looking for low maintenance. The problem I need solved has shifted and now Django is too much boilerplate (APIs and models are perhaps too distant as concepts), and too much maintenance work. Auth is perhaps underemphasised as an area for improvement. The built in auth isn't really fit for purpose anymore, and the various extensions for federation / passkeys take work to integrate and change a lot.
None of this is to write off Django or the people who've worked on it: I'm genuinely grateful for the framework. It's let me build open source things that help people out. The typical problems most of us standing up small-to-medium solutions need solved by a backend have just shifted underneath the framework, and it hasn't had the resourcing to keep up.
I've been looking at Pocketbase as a replacement. I think I'd prefer something that uses Postgres rather than sqlite, but it's pretty awesome as a solution for those two or three day projects, and the maintenance burden looks like it's pretty low on an ongoing basis.
I'd like to be able to say, as a page / site, "disable all APIs that let this page communicate out to the net" and for that to be made known to the user.
It'd be quite handy for making and using utility pages that do data manipulation (stuff compiled to wasm, etc) safely and ethically. As a simple example, who else has pasted markdown into some random site to get HTML/... or uploaded a PNG to make a favicon or whatever.
cleric here, so excuse me for getting theological: but there should be (and at times truly has been, even if flawed) a shared understanding of the dignity and worth of every person. if we have that, then when one party or another is in power, they know that they are expected to care for minorities and for the stranger, and for the 'other side'.
we should be willing to vote for that.
that seems to be breaking down, throughout the western world.
we should never denigrate or infringe upon the personhood of anyone. we should take the higher road. and I'm not arguing that the oppressed should accept their oppression: I'm arguing that the oppressors should listen to the oppressed, and change.
I live in Australia – our constitution is a strange mashup of the UK model (which is certainly the primary influence), and things gleaned from the US. Something I observe is that we're more willing to admit the possibility of non-partisan spaces. For example, rather than electoral commissions being bipartisan, they're non-partisan, with partisan input. It is a serious matter if an official of such an organisation is found to have publicly stated political views. We have some people who make it their profession to be boring, and to simply uphold the precepts of society: including the rights of minorities. That's a serious sacrifice, made routinely by judges and senior public servants.
I find myself quite terrified that this is being eroded. I don't know how we turn it around: but I certainly speak up for the dignity of all through my ministry. We all ought to speak up.
What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury.
This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest and so I could use it to let people know what events are on, if a service is cancelled, the current prayer list, ... the applications would be endless. I'd definitely pay a couple of hundred dollars per device for a solid version of such a thing, if it could be mounted and then recharged every month or two.