My oldest computer book I won’t part with is Alan Simpson’s dBase III+ Programmer's reference guide, circa 1987. This book was transformative and allowed me to get a gig as a coder, so much self driven practice on a crappy underpowered generic clone PC. That crappy hardware was an advantage I didn’t see at the time, having to think about routines that were fast enough based not because of faster disks and tons of RAM.
Do I need this book? Not so much. But it brings me joy carefully flipping through it on occasion.
> All those real-time features are antipatterns that do nothing but create anxiety and a false sense of urgency. We use Slack at work...
...and I use other apps to keep in touch with family in different time zones. For me knowing somebody is online in real time is quite comforting. Knowing they got my message and then that they read it, even if they don't reply, is also useful.
I see your point but there is valid usage outside of a corporate setting.
So many reasons not to use SMS: No indicators that the message was actually received (2023 and SMS is still flaky on deliveries), no read receipts, no presence notifications, no typing notifications, no encryption in transit or rest, no escaping group chat spam... that's just the high points.
Yes, this is a concern as as I'm testing it as a daily driver there are quite a few public networks it won't work with. For non technical end users it's a show stopper.
Without TCP/IP you're back to running dual wg and ovpn services and pretty much where we are with ip4 vs. 6. One is 'better' but the other works everywhere.