The struggle against spam has led to a situation where large companies hold significant control, ostensibly to prevent spam. Yet, despite these measures, the spam issue persists, and the complexity of hosting one's own email server has increased substantially.
Maybe it's time we moved on to a different protocol?
I agree about the cloud having the potential to be a good fit for CI builds, but I don't think it's there yet as there is a time overhead with turning on and off a cloud VM.
Ideally, we would have serverless functions doing this, but most cloud providers limit the run time for those.
Another problem is that a lot of build systems are single threaded, and the chances of finding a server CPU that runs outperforms a 5Ghz home CPU are very low.
I think it's not too late to create a modern open-source alternative to PDF.
I find it unacceptable that something that has become so widely used doesn't have proper free tools for editing.
Society shouldn't be limited by income if they want (have?) to use PDFs, or else suffer from a bad experience.
The other bigger problem with PDF is that a lot of the times it's used for something for which it wasn't made to be used for. Anything that is expected to be consumed on both mobile and desktop devices should never use PDFs. Government forms should not use PDFs with hacky embedded scripts either.
Maybe it's time we moved on to a different protocol?