izalutski

The payment processors are, at the core, specialist insurance businesses. They know how to underwrite transaction risk and counterparty risk and FX risk very well, better than generalist insurers, in part thanks to their scale. So these "billions" are actually a tiny fraction of the volume they process; counterparties are happily sharing a cut in exchange for peace of mind.

I believe that doing nothing, on purpose, especially for prolonged time (months, years), especially in solitude, is often _the_ most productive, highest leverage activity of all that an individual can be doing. The reason is that our subconscious is way more powerful than our conscious. The logical reasoning engine in our brain is really quite basic. Think a silly 8-bit console emulator running on an an actual modern piece of hardware (subconscious brain). And so relying on subconscious is somewhat like using hardware acceleration. The brain often knows better, but you cannot quite articulate what it is that needs to be done or why. And if you keep ignoring that signal, keep silencing it, keep forcing "doing the right thing" over what it's trying to tell you - that's a recipe for failure. You better listen. How? By doing nothing to the point of getting bored and looking how to "kill time". That's when your subconscious is finally heard. It keeps gently nudging you in the right direction without revealing the grander plan. Perhaps it doesn't have a plan; or perhaps it does but you're better off not knowing it. I also believe that procrastination is an acute case of the same. Your subconscious is screaming - hey human, this activity, this project, this job doesn't quite make sense. Again, you better listen. Otherwise you'll perhaps get more stuff done - but the wrong kind of stuff. Personally I'm looking back at my own timeline, and the gaps between jobs when I was up to nothing whatsoever as some of the most productive periods of my life. Not in a "I did X" way - more like, "I became more of what I want to be faster than at any other time".

Yep, backwards they did

(Disclosure: I'm from Digger and OpenTF so am biased)

Hashi's biggest miscalculation is that they put Terraform (an open language / ecosystem) into the same bucket as Vault and Consul, which are hostable backend applications.

BSL makes sense for Vault, just like it does for MongoDB. It is reasonable to prevent others from charging for hosting your code.

But with Terraform, the backend part (TF Cloud) was never even open source. And it's not required for Terraform to work.

Hashi shot themselves in the foot. Unlike with Vault or Consul, there is enormous vested interest in the community to keep Terraform truly open. Hashi trying to enforce everyone to use their non-oss backend with it will only result in Hashi losing the privileged (and well deserved) position among providers of commercial products in the Terraform ecosystem.

There's a fundamental difference Terraform's "server" was never open-source in the first place So you already cannot pull the move that AWS did with Elastic and Mongo The open-source part of Terraform is the CLI, the compiler, etc Extremely puzzling move

Yes indeed a puzzling move from Hashicorp's leadership perspective. Could be a miscalculation; or no calculation at all.

It looks like it boils down to being no longer able to "incorporate the source code or embed or distribute newer versions of Terraform." (From Spacelift's blog). For a piece of software that doesn't even have a server, this seems extremely restrictive. I wouldn't be surprised if Hashicorp takes a few steps back on this / provides clarifications for specific use cases

Indeed - but the Terraform community appears to be hit the hardest. Because unlike Consul, there's no open-source hostable anything. It feels just an arbitrary restriction for a language + CLI; the terms of the licence can be viewed as if whatever you ship has Terraform cli embedded, you're in breach. I can see the reason for SPL like Mongo did - it is indeed unfair for AWS to make money off hosted open-source mongodb. But this move by Hashi I'm struggling to wrap my head around

Atlantis was a great tool back in the day and still works well in most scenarios. The main issue with it is that it also takes on running the jobs (as in Terraform binary runs on the same VM it runs). Which makes it similar to Jenkins and other first-generation CI systems.

Companies that use Atlantis at scale (eg Lyft) felt the need to fork it and use a scalable compute backend instead, eg Temporal. At which point you've basically got a DIY in-house CI.

Our view is that it's best to keep matters separate. The CI part with compute, jobs, logs etc is a solved problem. What's unsolved for Terraform is state-aware logic when / how to run those jobs. It's all about the orchestrator really.

Yeah naming is fun

The most fun thing is - Digger + Dagger could be a great combo! We haven't yet explored properly but in theory it shouldn't be anything different from adding another CI provider; we already support GitHub Actions, Gitlab CI and Azure DevOps

A lot of the problem is gone after realising that productivity has little to do with efficiency and almost everything with prioritisation / focus. As soon as you become aware of your "attention flow" (what your attention span is spent on, like cash flow) it becomes hard to justify reading stuff like that.