However, I learned so much from the entire system.
* The CSS of the Plone theme was a Masterpiece. There is a very good reason why Wikipedia used a near direct copy Plone’s CSS for most of the 2000s. Using just a layer of CSS and minor changes to the templates, I could radically re-theme an entire site in a short amount of time.
* Plone enforced semantic HTML and used XHTML. Regardless of what you think of the value of semantics and XHTML, it thought me how to create well structured HTML at a time when the web was full of very broken HTML4
* While programming was painful, Plone’s UX for content managers was first rate. I was invoked in testing Plone, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Plone got top marks by a large margin
* Again too marks for Accessibility. In 2005, I built a Plone site for a nonprofit that worked with the blind. I remember users saying they could not believe how easy Plone was to use using the Jaws screen reader
* Multi-lingual sites with workflows for translators. Last year I ran into a translator who used a Plone site I build 20 years ago. They lamented that none of the sites the work on today are as good as that old Plone site.
Had he not been lieutenant-colonel at that age maybe he could have had a quiet happy life instead of ruining and ending the one of thousands of his contemporaries and having his own life end so badly.
Why do all those micro framework copy the worst aspects of flask?
The global request object, the bad integration with sqlalchemy, the strong coupling with an application object that forced the indirection of blueprints...
If you start again from scratch, forcing people to migrate their stack and therefor leave their ecosystem behind, at least fix the glaring API problems.
And the amazing algo that made skype work as a P2P system with very little bandwidth circa 2000 is now lost. Locked down in Microsoft's proprietary attic gathering dust while each conf app gets worse as the time goes by.
The better syntax used to be a selling point, but now with AI being able to generate any trivial one-liner and minor scripts you need on a day-to-day basics, have a bad syntax would only affect bigger projects, which I would not write in Fish shell anyway.
Generative AI might be able to generate them, but it's still on you to understand the result and check that it indeed does what you want. And with the sometimes very nuance- or foot-gun-rich syntax of bash, that's rather a significant burden, if you're not familiar enough with the syntax to write the script yourself in the first place.
Speak for yourself, but I would not want to be beholden to AI for every trivial shell one-liner. "Sorry boss, ChatGPT is down, I can't count how many *.txt files are in this directory. See you tomorrow!"
Scripting languages are so dynamic, flexible, arcane, and subtle and the consequences for getting scripts wrong are so potentially catastrophic for a system that they are absolutely the last thing I would ever dare generate via LLM.
We should not outlaw tools. Lock picks are fun and some ordinary people have a hobby of lock picking. You shouldn't go to jail because you possess a lock pick. Electronic devices are the same.
It's dangerously close to the "thought crime".
In the IT world that would mean going to jail if you have John the Ripper installed.
The sentiment is very much strongly warranted. It derives from 1) an inversion of the legal onus, and 2) a dangerous slippery slope in civil liberty.
Car manufacturers have been repeatedly caught with their pants down on the multiple security flaws in keyless ignition systems. These are multi-million dollar businesses choosing not do spend money on recalls or R&D to mitigate this. These corporations are effectively externalizing private costs with public over-reaching legislation and public law enforcement.
Secondly, and much more gravely, the criminalizing with 'unlimited fine', as most laws, will rely on non-technical people's interpretation. In practice this means (as prior history shows with regards to legislation and tech), that the step between banning Bulgarian RF repeater/jammers for key fobs, and charging a 16 year old with a several thousands Pounds fine just for using an SDR dongle becomes something very real.
For anyone with experience past or present in autocratic states it is also an obvious reduction of civil liberties in (what should be) a democratic society.
Stealing is already outlawed, so banning the devices is not comparable to murder. What would be comparable if the government decided to ban knives and hammers? Those "devices" are used to commit murders, and anyone possessing them could be prosecuted for the crime of murder.
The equivalent argument would be banning something that makes murder really really easy without much training or willpower. Killing with a knife is hard, and just not very accessible (if you doubt me, try going hunting for deer with a knife instead of a rifle). The equivalent would be some device that made killing really easy, eg something that supported point and shoot. Like, if someone invented a ray gun that you could just point at people and they would die, that would banned really quickly even by the most libertarian governments (because society doesn’t survive very long with them around, or society doesn’t ban them and is just replaced by another society that does).
Lock picks at least take some skill, they aren’t super accessible. But an RF repeater seems to be fairly accessible according to how quickly it spread (although most modern fobs stop transmitting when stationary, so these are only effective for people who carry fobs in their pockets all the time).
You need to think about accessibility more! All of your other techniques just aren't that effective, which is why they aren't used for much murder very much. Burning a school down vs a gun to rack up mass casualties? The fire alarm would go off and that is that. The same with using a power tool like a drill to kill someone, you can do it if you try really hard, but your chances of success aren't very high.
Anything that makes the deed "easy" is simply going to make it easier to perform and hence performed more often. It isn't rocket science, and it isn't binary! Yes, you can kill someone with your bare hands, or use an ice pick, or whatever, but not easily, like you could with a gun.
That was such a low blow, given we have stellar companies like OVH that have demonstrated their skills and willingness to bring great hosting, and are fully local.
