In terms of deliberate attacks on a DC, an adversary that can bomb a blast resistant bunker can easily bomb the data lines going in and out, to say nothing of external power supplies. I guess you can at least repair the lines after the attack, but it's pretty easy to knock it offline if that's your goal. I just don't see the value in making a DC blast resistant compared to the huge costs.
They are pretty well founded. You can read old rhyme dictionaries and see how the words evolved eg when borrowed by Japan at one time and then when borrowed again a couple of hundred years later. We can’t ever know 100% but it’s not idle speculation either.
Different field, but it drives me crazy that people talk about Chinese philosophy and insist on using Mandarin pinyin for it. Mandarin is language that evolved from Classical Chinese thousands of years later! There are other, equally valid contemporary derived pronunciations like Cantonese or even Japanese and Korean. The reason to use Mandarin is because it is the most widely spoken language derived from Classical Chinese, but it's 100% not how Confucius or any of them spoke!
I see people say that they're confused by it a lot, sure. But do the bugs get to production? That was my question. Buffer overflows get to production all the time! But do the concrete vs interface nils get to production or are they caught in dev and then someone opens an issue to ask why it doesn't work? I suspect it's more the later.
Obviously, it would be better if Go didn't have this problem. If I made Go 2, it would have blank interface be "none" and blank pointer be "null". Even better, I would add a reference type that can't be null and sum types or something like that. But these things are all relative.
In Python, people using "is" for numbers is a problem. But in practice only very junior developers do that and it mostly gets caught in dev. There was the Digg outage caused by a default argument being [] instead of None https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ and that I see as a slightly more serious bug that can slip by without good code review.
Every language has pitfalls and the question is whether they outweigh the other benefits.
Well, for example, when I worked at the Baltimore Sun, the owners at Tribune Media sold the already owned outright headquarters of the Sun, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, etc. and has us all lease office space from somewhere else instead. This is an insane business decision. No one who wants to keep a business alive would think to replace a money making asset (just lease out the other floors of the building) with a money losing ongoing expense. But it gives you one quarter of extremely high profitability in exchange for lower profits for the rest of time, so they did it.
"Enshitification" is rapidly becoming a meaningless term of disapproval, but it had a precise definition when Doctorow coined it:
> This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.
GitHub directed a huge surplus to developers compared to what came before it. Microsoft bought it and worked on furthering the lock in with Actions, and now the ship is slowly moving towards wringing the extra value out of us. It's not at the bottom of the hill yet, but it's definitely on the slope. They already have ads for themselves on it. The ads are just going to slowly creep outwards as necessary to produce a smooth revenue curve.
I think GitHub was designed for getting work done, but since Microsoft bought them, they are slowly moving into enshitification territory. For example, they have a homepage that is just a wanna be social media feed and the file contents pages have ads for Copilot and in general there are ads for VSCode and blah blah. It was pretty good, but it's going to get much worse. :-)
FWIW, I haven't done that kind of setup for years because modern iOS/macOS does email server discovery, where you enter "[email protected]" and then it does discovery and figures out the right imap.example.com:587 etc for you by looking at DNS.
I went cold turkey on Twitter last week because it’s just so unrelentingly negative. HN is more just silly, IMO. Yes, there are dumb “just build Google search in a weekend” comments, but it’s easier to ignore bad HN comments than the unending stream of Twitter negativity. In part that’s because you can pick which articles to read comments on and which to skip the comments on.
If I click on link 1 then click on link 2 several minutes later, 1 probably sucked. The difficulty is if I click on 1 and then 2 quickly, it just means I’m opening a bunch of tabs proactively.
The only reliable backup mechanism is starting a successful cult whose main tenet is that your data is valuable communication from God, so that they continually duplicate it. Anything else will go bust in a hundred years at most.