The only reason why this is not happening is that there is more than one such "federation" currently and no one is unquestionably stronger. And at no point in history had a stronger faction submitted to the will of a weaker faction just to avoid hostilities. In a sense war is just a reality check when it is unclear who is really stronger. While studying history, it struck me that many countries (current unit of sovereignty) honor some person who was a "great unifier" - created a cohesive whole and put an end to internal conflicts. As a rule, this person was a war-mongering psychopath.
As you notice, at the end of the 20th century we almost had this kind of "federation" when the US and its allies were the only center of power in the world. The US arrived at that point by winning an economic and cultural war. But its coalition failed to entrench itself, grew weaker and more bloated and now we are facing these dangerous rifts between different factions of humanity.
Note: in the current emotional climate this may sound like war apologism. It is not - war is unspeakably horrible for everyone involved. But this is what an impartial alien looking from an orbit would deduce about the humanity.
It is nice when a program can be significantly sped up by a local change like that but this is not always the case.
To go truly fast, you need to unleash the full potential of the hardware and doing it can require re-architecting the system from the ground up. For example, both postgres and clickhouse can do `select sum(field1) from table group by field2`, but clickhouse will be 100x faster and no amount of microoptimizations in postgres will change that.
I actually have a lot of respect for old school game programmers because they have two traits that many of us who develop mainstream commercial software often lack: a) they care about performance and not in the abstract, but performance as evaluated by an actual human (latency issues in a messaging app are tolerable, a game with latency issues is simply not fun to play) and b) they can sit down without much fuss and quickly write the damn code (the ability that slowly atrophies as one works on a multi-year-old codebase where every change is a bit of a PITA). Sure, the constraints are different, but a lot of it is simply learned helplessness.
You write like "what women are looking for in a man" is some absolute thing, but it is decidedly not! It is highly context-dependent. As an extreme example, there are some places on Earth where simply not being an alcoholic can make you a desirable mate.
> Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life
Yeah, but where is the guarantee that therapy really un-brainwashes instead of re-brainwashing you to just be content with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. I guess it is a totally rational strategy if you want to maximize happiness (whatever that means) but it still feels like a cop-out.
Run some command that outputs more than one page of text and try to scroll back in your terminal emulator. You won't see the remainder of the output, while with ordinary ssh and eternal terminal you will.
Maybe all PGP users are morons, that's beside the point. My point is that if someone recommends something but doesn't follow their own recommendation, it is most likely that the recommendation is not well thought-out and can be ignored. In this case the recommendation to use Signal looks more like a refutation of the point brought up by PGP advocates and not something that anyone would actually do.
> > Put a Signal number on your security page to receive bug bounty reports, not a PGP key.
Does anyone actually do this? Even Signal developers themselves don't! (see https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320791-Ho...). Instead there is a plain old email address where you are supposed to send your Signal number so that you can chat.
I think you are talking about compatibility in general (which is great to have!) but not about ABI compatibility. Nothing apart from cultural conventions prevents maintainer of a ruby gem from strictly adhering to semver or maintainer of a C library from breaking everything in a minor version release.
What I mean is that in addition to rules of the language I program in (say C or C++) there is another bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules that I must constantly be aware of to ensure nothing breaks. Rules like "don't reorder fields of structs" or "you can add new methods to a class as long as they are not virtual. and sometimes you can add virtual methods too as long as they end up at the end of vtable".
How do I ensure that I conform to these rules apart from being disciplined about them? If everything compiles, am I good? No! If everything links, am I good? No! Depending on linker options and the nature of incompatibility the program using incompatible ABIs can blow up at runtime or just silently corrupt data.
And don't get me started on the venerable "pimpl idiom". A page of boilerplate just to ensure the most basic thing.
Hope that clarifies my short sentiment a bit :) I agree that once you grasp the rules following them is not that hard but it is just another bit of incidental complexity that we agreed to maintain.
FOSS is from another era. Back then Microsoft were the bad guys and FOSS was largely a response to their hegemony. Ubuntu bug #1 was "Microsoft has a majority market share" and it is kind of resolved now but increasingly irrelevant. Now it is a different kind of challenge.
True, if you are a geek, you can use open-source software to cobble together some resemblance of popular cloud services but under your own control. There are even detailed guides on how to do it (see also: https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign). But that's a lot of nuisance and in the end what you get is an inferior version.
Sure, there is nothing of substance revealed in the article, but still the gist is that we should be vaguely concerned. My point is that I am tired of being vaguely concerned.
While I agree with you, I think I am starting to suffer from a kind of "privacy violation revelations fatigue". I have read the article and thought "so here is another gimmick that steals away a bit of my privacy, so what? no big deal". And that's scary.
The problem is there is no coherent programme on how to counter the privacy-encroachment trend. There is a bit of general dissatisfaction, some idealists urging us to repent and leave the clouds and a good amount of profiteers trying to benefit from that dissatisfaction. Meanwhile the forces behind this trend are organized and powerful.
As you notice, at the end of the 20th century we almost had this kind of "federation" when the US and its allies were the only center of power in the world. The US arrived at that point by winning an economic and cultural war. But its coalition failed to entrench itself, grew weaker and more bloated and now we are facing these dangerous rifts between different factions of humanity.
Note: in the current emotional climate this may sound like war apologism. It is not - war is unspeakably horrible for everyone involved. But this is what an impartial alien looking from an orbit would deduce about the humanity.