today's leftovers
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Privacy and freedom should be the legacy we leave, not the opposite
October 21st marks Global Encryption Day, a time that calls to mind the many benefits of an unfairly (but increasingly) maligned technology. This has given us an occasion to reflect on recent attacks to encryption on the part of governments, specifically the European Union.
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Chat control measures have been discussed in the EU for some time. Now, they seem dangerously close to adoption. They follow a temporary measure adopted by the European Parliament, which requested that communication providers voluntarily hand over information to law enforcement sourced from an individual's communications. A proposal currently under discussion within the Council of the European Union seeks to make this measure permanent, and moreover, to make it mandatory for email and chat hosts to spy on their users. In the case of end-to-end encryption, this means installing a permanent client-side backdoor into both free and nonfree messaging apps. And while there has been some resistance to legislators' actions from advocacy groups like European Digital Rights, and others in the EU, this has not created a change in direction. Chat control needs to be stopped in its tracks.
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New Liaison role for the Native Language Communities - The Document Foundation Blog
We are launching a new role in the Native Language Communities. This role aims to improve the communication between the global projects, The Document Foundation and the local communities.
This communication should be directed in two ways: keep local communities informed on what is happening internationally, and keep the international community informed of what is achieved by the local communities.
My hope is also that TDF will be able to bring more help, if it is informed of the achievements, difficulties, wishes and needs locally.
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Dominique Leuenberger: openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/42
To me, this week felt somewhat unspectacular. Staging projects are moving along, snapshots are coming out and no drama happened. That’s a good week, right? For Tumbleweed, this seems to be any regular week with 7 published snapshots (1014…1020).
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the death of the meme
Coming Soon ™
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Managing Container and Kubernetes TCO
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KubeVirt Is Key to Protecting VM Investment
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How I use Linux on my Chromebook
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Musings on Python Type Hints
"Gradual Typing" has become incredibly popular over the last 8 years or so. The most notable examples of this phenomena exist in the JavaScript space. Since JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web there have been several efforts to leverage the benefits of static type systems to enable easier programming-in-the-large for JavaScript. Gradual type systems such as TypeScript and Flow have found the most success in this space.
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Conways Law
Pretty much all the practitioners I favor in Software Architecture are deeply suspicious of any kind of general law in the field. Good software architecture is very context-specific, analyzing trade-offs that resolve differently across a wide range of environments. But if there is one thing they all agree on, it's the importance and power of Conway's Law. Important enough to affect every system I've come across, and powerful enough that you're doomed to defeat if you try to fight it.
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Conway's Law is essentially the observation that the architectures of software systems look remarkably similar to the organization of the development team that built it. It was originally described to me by saying that if a single team writes a compiler, it will be a one-pass compiler, but if the team is divided into two, then it will be a two-pass compiler. Although we usually discuss it with respect to software, the observation applies broadly to systems in general.
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How Trying New Programming Languages Helped Me Grow as a Software Engineer
When you use one programming language daily in your job as a Software Engineer, it's easy to fall into the trap of that language bubble. I want to show you how stepping outside your comfort zone and learning new languages and paradigms helped me grow as a Software Engineer.
Over the years I've transitioned from frontend developer to full-stack developer and even tried professional game development! In that time, I managed and mentored developers at different stages of experience.
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RAII: Compile-Time Memory Management in C++ and Rust :: The Coded Message
I don’t want you to think of me as a hater of C++. In spite of the fact that I’ve been writing a Rust vs C++ blog series in Rust’s favor (in which this post is the latest installment), I am very aware that Rust as it exists would never have been possible without C++. Like all new technology and science, Rust stands on the shoulders of giants, and many of those giants contributed to C++.
And this makes sense if you think about it. Rust and C++ have very similar goals. The C++ community has done a lot over all these years to pioneer new programming language features in line with those goals. C++ has then given these features years to mature in its humongous ecosystem. And because Rust also doesn’t have to be compatible with C++, it can then steal those features without some of the caveats they come with in C++.
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A Real World React -> htmx Port
It is all well and good talking about REST & HATEOAS in theory or describing the Hypermedia-Driven Application architecture, but, at the end of the day, what matters in software is practical: Does it work? Does it improve things?
We can say for sure that htmx works, since we use it in our own software. But it is hard to say that it would be an improvement over other approaches, since we haven't had an apples-to-apples comparison of how htmx might compare with, say, react.