simplotek

> Exactly, the "C" in CRDT is a little misleading. They are "conflict free" in as much as they are able to merge and resolve in the basic sense. That does not mean that the resulting state is valid or meets your internal schema.

I disagree, the "conflict" in "conflict-free" is not misleading at all. As I see it, your issue with the "conflict" lies in a misunderstanding of what a conflict actually is in the context of CRDTs and what eliminating them entails. Concurrent updates can be free from conflicts but still end up with a semantically inconsistent document, and that is perfectly fine.

The whole point of CRDTs is to allow collaborative editing without resorting to mutex locks or forcing users to retry cancelled updates. That's why Yjs merges two captions added to a figure, and also why other CRDTs don't stop concurrent updates that make no sense semantically, such as having users concurrently writing incoherent sentences. Document-wise, there is no conflict or inconsistence.

> Anecdata but the more "official" covid subreddits /r/coronavirus and then /r/covid19 brought started off pretty free speech but then began bringing in more and more moderation (...)

Aren't you talking about the growth in conspiracy nuts fabricating all sorts of conspiracy theories and assorted loony claims, such as the infamous "covid is caused by 5G" idiot fest, which were flooding covid-related forums?

Are we now expected to turn a blind eye to all the sadly avoidable deaths that conspiracy nuts and antivaxxers with their bullshit claims brought upon the world in the last couple of years? I mean, countless people ended up queuing veterinarian supply stores to gargle on horse dewormer thanks to these morons. Depicting these loonies as innocent truth-seekers that just asked questions and fought conspiracies is intellectually dishonest.

> Something like this is on my roadmap,

Superb!

> would you mind telling me a bit about the metrics and the scale you'd expect?

It will depend mostly on what the service offers.

If the service only supports running a single isolated container without any scaling whatsoever then it would be helpful if we could monitor básico stuff like CPU and memory utilization, and also network traffic, free disk space, and also disk IO. If the service supports auto-scaling then it would be helpful to track all resource utilization rates along with all alarms and events involved. Auto-scaling also implies load balancing thus if that's the case then it would also be helpful to track the basic load balancing indicators, as well as request logs.

In the end it really depends on what services you're planning on offering, and how you'll charge for it. As a user I would need to monitor any metric which is directly and indirectly involved in determining cost, and on top of that I need to monitor performance.

> Would you expect always on or more of an ephemeral container?

The most pressing need would be always on containers to be able to go the lift-and-shift onboarding route to managed services, but ephemeral containers sound like function-as-a-service and those are pretty exciting as well.

> Please do a managed Kubernetes next.

If we're taking requests, I would love a Fargate-like service. It would be absolutely fantastic if Hetzner provided a service where users uploaded a Docker image, and Hetzner took care of handling the networking bits and running it, and gather metrics.

> Needless to say, people are pretty happy with smartphone photography. Which is optically pure shit, but clever software fixes that quite well. And not just that, it's idiot-proof. Those are two monumental achievements.

In the past photography was optically pure shit, and we could only take 36 photos at a time before cranking out a new roll of film, and we had to drive to a photo store to pay to get those 36 photos developed and only them we could see if the photos were any good.

> It could also be that extended lockdowns caused a ton of deaths

Do you have any evidence at all that comes close to suggest this hypothesis, let alone substantiate it?

It's also important to note that all the emergency public health measures put in place to curtail covid infections also contributed to lower the spread of the flu, thus it's expected that the number of flu cases behind excess deaths is significantly lower than the baseline.

> So a code monolith I can just dump on a Linux box is in again?

Aren't you grossly extrapolating a tad? Nothing suggests there's a "code monolith" involved in the story. Just because the topic is single-tenant instances. Also, single-box deployments are completely orthogonal to "code monolith". Finally, just because a company offers a product that does not mean there's a major architectural shift in the industry.

> FWIW - we run secret detection in our trunk check precommit action - so we make sure that secrets are never committed into local or remote branches.

Irrelevant. You're describing a failsafe. It's like claiming that you don't need to care about speed limits because a road has guardrails. The whole process is broken if it fails to address the main reason confidential info can be pushed into repositories.

> circumstantial evidence, but nothing that was definitive

That's not how things work. The role of a Certificate Authority is to act as a trusted third party. If that third party is unable or unwilling to demonstrate that they are trustworthy then naturally they can't be expected to assume that role.

> At least that is the only thing that keeps the EU Commission from going full police state.

Such an extraordinary claim.

Are you able to provide any evidence that supports your claim that at any time the EU Commission tried to go "full police state", and that courts kept that from happening?

> When people comment internally and there is even a hint of cynicism in what they say, they are frequently called out on it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like whenever people presented valid criticism, the standard approach to silence it would be to criticise the tone with a holier-than-thou attitude. Sounds like a cynical ploy to shield yourself from criticism.

> But nothing goes directly into main.

That's not a reasonable argument. The problem is pushing confidential info into a repository. It matters nothing what the branch you push it is called.

> No, that's not a fair characterisation

Prove me wrong and provide the single best example of objective evidence you are able to produce.

Go on.

> There's a mountain of circumstantial evidence (...)

In other words, there is no evidence. Right?

On the flip side, these conspiracy theories sound more like fabrications from loons caught in their little world.

> I don’t understand what you mean by JSON was not invented. It was invented by Douglas Crockford.

Douglas Crockford took his time to write up a specification for the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

That specification is, quite literally, "based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999."

It's in the name. There is no way around this.

MDN's doc on JavaScript's eval() vs JSON.parse() refer to JSON as "a subset of JavaScript syntax to represent data."

Claiming that someone discovered JSON makes as much sense as reading the C standard section on struct initialization and proceed to claim you discovered the C struct notation (CSN).

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/struct_initializati...

> What’s the conspiracy?

Don't underestimate the ability of these conspiracy loons to fabricate more and more stories. I expect them to react to tasting a big nothing sandwich with more conspiracy theories on how shady imaginary organizations edited out all the smoking guns.

> How many of these would you need to update in the direction of "maybe some of them do know some of what they're talking about"?

None of them knows anything at all about anything whatsoever. You're talking about morons who abuse conjectures to build up their personal fictional stories with the goal of fooling themselves into believing they are special and smarter than everyone around them.

Listening to conspiracy nuts regarding their pet conspiracies makes as much sense as taking investment advice from lottery winners: even if they are right once in their life,their whole rationalization is deeply wrong and has no bearing in reality.

> I always find it interesting how when these things get revealed, nobody seems to update their priors on "conspiracy theories" going forward.

The problem with this blend of specious reasoning is that to start off these conspiracy theories do not have any prior whatsoever. These conspiracy loons build their system of belief at best around flimsy conjectures, and reinforce their baseless beliefs on any noise that they manage to overfit around those.

A broken clock being right twice a day does not vindicate conspiracies around broken clocks.

> My guess is that XML is good for situations where text and data is mixed.

I don't agree. My take is that HTML/XML-like syntaxes benefit from familiarity from front-end developers, and a DSL to express document/component trees ends up simplifying the job of expressing document/component trees.

> I agree, mostly. But since when isn’t it obvious that posting data with a browser will send that data somewhere?

I'd be surprised if anyone at all, specially developers, expects a browser to do anything other than transfer data to/from the internet.

Either you do not know what's the meaning of "red herring" or you're failing to understand the problem. Personal data is the reddest of data, even and specially in a corporate context.

You can also have more data that is red, but if your infosec policies fail to prevent or stop personal information being sent, which is the lowest of low-hanging fruits to spot, then you will assuredly be leaking more red data that is harder to spot.

It makes no sense to try to downplay the problem if leaking personal data. It's the most serious offense in any context, not only for the data but specially for what it says about the security policies in place.

> I mean it the other way: I see the problems routinely downplayed with excuses like "it's not collecting personal data".

You claimed that personal data was a red herring. It is not. Shipping personal data is the worst possible scenario. It's unthinkable to try to make the case that a data leak is not serious because it's just personal data.

> It's always strange to think that we went through formats like XML (and even earlier, XDR) before inventing something as seemingly simple and obvious as JSON.

It's my understanding that JSON was not invented. It's just the necessary and sufficient parts of JavaScript to define data structures, and could be parsed/imported in a browser with a call to eval().

People who complain about JSON completely miss the whole point. It's not that it's great or trouble-free, it's that it solved the need to exchange data with a browser without requiring any library or framework.

> Personal data is a red herring. It's not the only thing that matters. For starters, using this at work with anything not explicitly public is likely a violation of your contract. (...)

"Personal data" means the reddest of data. If a system collects and tracks personal information then it will be expected to collect highly sensitive information that is not personal. It makes absolutely no sense at all to try to downplay security problems by coming up with excuses such as "oh it's only leaking personal data".

> Processing multi-GB files in the browser is... fun. Doing that kind of thing on a server is easier.

This sounds like a strawman. Not everyone wrangles multi-GB files, let alone JSON documents. Those who do are already readily aware of the implications. I mean,some popular text editors even struggle with multi-GB of plain text files.

You don't need a server to handle JSON. There is no excuse.

> That's only for the telemetry that happens during the install process (if I've read the link correctly).

Wrong. That's for the dotnet cli tool to phone home each and every time you run a command.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetr...

Microsoft even provides a page which showcases summaries of some of the metrics they collect from you if you don't disable this feature. These metrics even include MAC addresses.

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/telemetry

> Seems quite reasonable as long as we accept them sending telemetry during install.

There is nothing reasonable about this. You should not be required to have tribal knowledge on how to use arcane tricks prior to running an application just to avoid being spied upon. It's a dark pattern, and one that conveys a motivation to spy upon unsuspecting users whether they approve it or not.

> Looks to me like he might recognize the scope of the problem (...)

I find it very unlikely that search, of all features, has problems where UI development is remotely relevant, let alone the solution. UI-wise, search consists of firing dumb requests to the backend and just update the UI with the results.

> Good lord. I can't imagine bragging, taking a job, then immediately asking other people how to do it.

This. What a public announcement of incompetence.

> It's sort of like modern art. Maybe you could have done it, but you didn't.

This makes zero sense. Changing a screen in a page is not a technical challenge. It is a Product Management call. Things are the way they are because the product owner sat with one or more UX designer and determined that that's exactly how they want the screen to be and to stay like that for all users. The only input developers have is to get the product vision to become a reality, and bolt a bunch of tests.