Would like to emphasize: Software is intangible. It fails to meet most standards of "what is real", because it exists entirely in the realm of symbols. You're at the edge of reality. To human instincts it seems like an unreal world without rules, so it unconsciously triggers all sorts of weird things, including a good bit of amoral behavior. Nasty things locked away in one's psyche come out to play.

Yes the modern toolchain is super-massive. There is no pushback. Remember when deployment was trivial?

My expectation is that the toolchain will expand by another order of magnitude because LLM's, not just because of what they can produce, but because we are lowering the ceiling with LLM assistance when it comes to just understanding the toolchain. That creates a vacuum that people can fill up with more stuff.

The "insanity" that makes people do this is hard to explain. It's certainly irrational and seemingly unconscious.

I would not move authorization into AWS unless you want to spend hours debugging YAML & JSON blobs & templates, struggle with verification, and worse yet, transfer application superuser work onto devs & admins. (Edit: also forgot about core feature lock-in that has to be redone if you switch clouds)

Having a user interface where trusted users can assign privileges to lower-level folks is massively advantageous if you build it right, by comparison. You do need to make fine-grained control possible, to be able to roll up permission sets into predefined roles, and - a simple matter that evades many - assign multiple roles to a given user. Users frequently "wear multiple hats", as they say, and you need to account for that.

I wonder if it would help to revoke patents that help google maintain its monopoly, assuming that's the case and it's doable by a judge/congress/someone?

What exactly is the nature of its monopoly that moots competition? I was of understanding that it's more than just ads on google search results, isn't it?

Why are the toilets (and other things) melted? Is this some artifact of the photography?

Are corporate profits actually at a peak, or just their percentage share of national profit (per the article)? Not in denial about the wealth gap, just wondering where profit growth is coming from.

Not guaranteed but easy, because Windows has mnemonics, where you can associate arbitrarily nested menus with actions, and each menu can have its own mnemonic key, so that you press ALT, then, say, "k", then, maybe "m" and so on, following along with the menus as they drop down.

This way it becomes easy to memorize key sequences; start by navigating with arrow keys, then eventually speed up as you memorize each menu item's mnemonic key, and if you ever forget, just look at the menu.

It was the keyboard-friendliest idea ever, without requiring any sort of terminal. I'd even say friendlier than MacOS (heresy!!) or, yes, VIM (burn the witch!!!)

Even if you didn't have mnemonics, you could use tab, arrow keys and alt if needed, to navigate, and space to "click" buttons and such.

So even if the developer forgot to configure mnemonics, which was as easy as prefixing a letter with ampersand, you could navigate by keyboard. Sometimes tedious but beats not being able.

> cmd+? i.e. cmd+shift+/ (...) Doesn't get simpler than that.

That's a very two-handed ableist view. Imagine having lost your arm and being told hitting three keys on opposite ends of the keyboard is simple.

I'm joking, but only about the calling you ableist and the emotional response parts. The situation does really occur. Keyboards aren't always the most accessible option.

(Hotkeys reveal mental limitations in myself. I can rarely remember them. I know a ton, but I've forgotten so many more. On MacOS in particular, when multiple modifiers are involved. Can never remember if it's cmd-shift, cmd-option, option-shift, cmd-ctrl, cmd-fn, or whatever.)

...What? Opposite ends?

The Shift key is right next to the / key.

The Command key is one key away.

Even on laptop keyboards.

I can trivially chord Cmd-Shift-/ with my right hand.

Usually though, the menu bar only appears on key release, not on holding it down, as part of pressing the ALT+something shortcut.

PageRank is really the beginning of popularity as proxy for authentic/truthful/accurate/etc.

Then we move on to upvotes, retweets, likes, listens, views, please-please-please-subscribe-to-my-channel, reviews etc. Thus the continuum of the "social" internet.

We tried really hard to make truth into a capitalist endeavor.

Using the kids' own artwork is a cool idea.