I have been walking some newer programmers through Git recently, so this topic is fresh on my mind. The commands in the blog post do not look friendlier or even different.
> The idea of “weighing souls” reminded me of another anti-spam solution from the 90s… believe it or not, there was once a company that used poetry to block spam!
> Habeas would license short haikus to companies to embed in email headers. They would then aggressively sue anyone who reproduced their poetry without a license. The idea was you can safely deliver any email with their header, because it was too legally risky to use it in spam.
Kind of a tangent but learning about this was so fun. I guess it's ultimately a hack for there not being another legally enforceable way to punish people for claiming "this email is not spam"?
IANAL so what I'm saying is almost certainly nonsense. But it seems weird that the MIT license has to explicitly say that the licensed software comes with no warranty that it works, but that emails don't have to come with a warranty that they are not spam! Maybe it's hard to define what makes an email spam, but surely it is also hard to define what it means for software to work. Although I suppose spam never e.g. breaks your centrifuge.
Great article, especially loved the focus on history! I’ve subscribed.
> Lastly, as much as we like to bash Windows for security problems, NT started with an advanced security design for early Internet standards given that the system works, basically, as a capability-based system.
I’m curious as to why the NT kernel’s security guarantees don’t seem to result in Windows itself being more secure. I’ve heard lots of opinions but none from a comparative perspective looking at the NT vs. UNIX kernels.
Laughed out loud at the unexpected "90/100" rating at the end. Very interesting read. Thought this was interesting in particular:
> When serving in Iraq or Iran, my biggest fear in those places was always the threat of physical harm, be it ambushes on our person or vehicles, being kidnapped, rocket or mortar attacks on our embassy or accommodation. There were close shaves and the threat and the fear never left you in all of these places.
> But as far as life in North Korea was concerned, there were none of these fears. Serving in North Korea gave you this strange feeling of being cut off, isolated and very insular and perversely at the same time “safe.”
I wonder how this compares to living in e.g. Libya under Gaddafi vs. after?
I admire how pilots are able to communicate so concisely and professionally. No one swore at each other or ranted over the radio. Southwest didn’t drag their feet because they didn’t appreciate FedEx’s tone.
I suspect that higher stakes encourage politeness. A much lower stakes example than the OP: politics at a startup vs. at a big company.
Obviously you could implement any algorithm using reference counting instead of garbage collection. The question is whether or not you really want to pepper your code with what is essentially manual memory management when necessary.