Dynamic typing is insane. You have to keep track of the type of absolutely everything, in your head. It’s like the assembly of type systems, except it makes your program slower instead of faster.

And that’s why the world is rapidly going to hell. Everyone is under attack and almost no one is willing to so much as lift a finger in resistance.

I’m talking about when the government wants an excuse for shutting down public discourse. Obviously it isn’t going to prosecute itself.

Fascist shutdown of public discourse, step by step:

1. Find out where public discourse is.
2. Post child porn on an obscure corner of it.
3. Take screenshots of the posted porn.
4. Send law enforcement to seize all the things.

I’m typing this on a ten year MacBook Pro

Lucky you, I guess, because I sure haven’t had such good fortune.

that is running a currently supported version of MacOS

How is that possible? The almost-dead MacBook I mentioned is younger than yours and is stuck on Monterey.

and runs as fast as the day I bought it.

Probably. I didn’t say anything about how fast they are, because all common platforms in use today still run reasonably well on decade-old hardware.

If it had 10ish GB of RAM, at least. Browsers eat RAM like popcorn.

I have a pile of Dell and Lenovo Windows laptops of similar age that can still run but are basically doorstops or suitable for beater Linux or BSD machines, definitely not daily drivers.

I’m guessing you didn’t pay $2500 for them, though. That’s down to specs, not manufacturer. Apple hardware is almost invariably high-spec and therefore quite fast, but Apple thankfully doesn’t have a monopoly on fast computers.

Similar longevity to Apple products isn’t a high bar.

How will I notice when the spare fails, if it’s only a spare and I don’t regularly use it? Then I’m down to only one key, and as any grumpy backup admin will tell you, if you have only one copy of something, you have zero copies.

I would have a key plugged into the computer pretty much all the time when I’m working, so anyone who compromises the computer can impersonate me as long as I’m at work. This would be mildly inconvenient to the attacker, but wouldn’t actually stop the attacker. And if the computer isn’t compromised, how is anyone going to get into my GitHub account even without 2FA? They certainly aren’t going to do it by guessing my 16-character generated password or Ed25519 SSH key.

Something-I-know is worthless for authentication in the age of GPU password cracking. Most humans, including myself, do not have photographic memories with which to memorize cryptographically secure passwords. We’re all using password managers for a reason, and a password database is something you have, not something you know.

Allowing a smartphone access to anything sensitive is even worse advice. Smartphones are notoriously insecure.

Hardware tokens are specifically designed to resist copying. Any means of copying it would be considered a security vulnerability.

Bits rot. A hardware token kept in a bank vault may or may not still work when I need it 10 years later, and there is no reasonable process for regularly verifying the integrity of its contents. Backup drives’ checksums are verified with every backup cycle, and so are the checksums on the file system being backed up (I’m using btrfs for that reason).

Hardware tokens are expensive. Mechanical lock keys are not.

I personally am afraid of this. What if something gets botched? I’ll be permanently locked out of my account!

I dislike MFA because it creates a risk of losing access to my account. I can back up my passwords; I can’t back up a hardware device.

Since when were Boston Dynamics robots sentient?

That was pretty much IBM’s excuse, if I recall correctly. Then it turned out IBM execs were well aware of who was buying their equipment and for what purpose…

I’m reminded of IBM’s dealings with the Nazis.

Linux is already dominant on just about everything except the desktop, and it has yet to suffer significant enshittification.

Edit: Well, a bunch of Linux distributions have suffered enshittification, if that counts.

I do believe that while programming has many ways of doing the same task, there is always an objectively best way to do it.

I’ve been writing code in one form or another for some 30 years now, and my observation so far has been the exact opposite: there are many problems in programming for which there is no one clearly superior solution, even in theory. Just like life in general, programming is full of trade-offs, compromises, and diminishing returns.

Linux: “We’re dropping support for this device because we’re fairly sure we had the last one in existence and it just died.”

That is so evil. I love it.

For tech support scammers, they’re awfully bad with a computer. Ctrl+A then Ctrl+X, ya noobs.

Problem: Oppenheimer, unlike JavaScript, was actually competent.