johnnycerberus

Interconnectedness of the world today is economically justified, it does not have any morality in it. In the same vein, if we would have to listen to your anti-morality point of view, we should have kept the connections as before even if we contribute to the global warming, to the deaths of many vulnerable people contributed by the rising number of viruses that are spreaded at an accelerated rate, to the number of cyberattacks that have quadrupled. Similarly to economically accessible transit around the world and its complexity, we have the Internet which is clearly becoming more and more prone to breaches exploiting vulnerabilities (log4j literally proved that everything was open for exploitation). Today, while I'm watching a random Romanian TV channel, many psychopaths at a round table are leading you to believe that Covid's risk is self inflicted by people who don't work out & are overweight and that lockdowns are unjust, it is all people's fault, that there's nothing moral in lockdowns and wearing masks, which I strongly disagree with and it is also not supported by data.

Yes, they should check for any possible breaches. As any other responsbile company already does, like AWS for example which not only checks for breaches, but also scans public repositories like GitHub and GitLab for leaked credentials. A company should also warn a user from time to time that the respective needs to update his password, some companies are so careless that they don't even pay attention to this latter small detail. Or at least to warn an account holder that he still has an account with them.

> and that makes your faulty memory their problem

It is not only memory that is flawed in humans. Hence the protective measures I'm proposing.

> against known breaches

What about the unknown ones? How do you protect your user's account when under GDPR Dropbox is the controller of the data? By sending mails ocassionally to update the password, to adopt 2FA, by locking account due to suspicious activity or to purge it in the end if no further action is taken. It ends with the deletion of the user.

To be fair, data retention is a hot topic right now in Europe, the pandemic and the increased screen time that resulted from it, the amount of accounts we had to create left and right require new regulations.

Do you have a paid account or a free account? If I store my documents on a free account for a one time send to the university application and then I forget about it, then Dropbox should purge it after a time to protect my data, as I don't have any "contract" with them like a subscription or something. The same for G2A, I have bought from them some game keys at a cheap price sometime ago and then I totally forgot that I have one, I couldn't even find the activation mail in my inbox, lol. One day in the summer I woke up with a mail that I have to pay an inactivity fee even if I'm just a row in their database and I have no contractual obligation with them.

I totally support this. It still amazes me that companies still do not delete/anonymize user accounts after periods of inactivity. Everything that is linked to your email address should be purged after 3-12 months of inactivity, including ecommerce like Amazon, game platforms like Steam, cloud storages like Dropbox, or even Hackernews. Good luck trying to find old accounts that you have used years ago, what if they were breached and now they are used by people with bad intentions. In my country (Romania), even barber shops that store user accounts for longer periods than necessary are fined the shit out of them for not closing accounts due to inactivity. Some years ago, I woke up with an inactive G2A account telling me that I have to pay a fee for inactivity. NO! I don't have to pay anything, purge it!

In Romania there's an old question to find the character of somebody: are you Roman or Greek? Because if you are Roman, you put practice above theory, you are a pragmatist, skeptic, if you are Greek you will put theory above practice, you are an idealist, optimist, at the expense of hardships in the material world and other potential drawbacks. Rob Pike chose Roman, otherwise it would have cost Google money to train those people and we don't know if those language features could bring any benefits for the kind of software they develop. As he said, they are not researchers working with category theory, instead they program ever-changing software for an imperfect world driven by profits, rather than academic idealism.

I think the JVM would also be a good choice once Loom lands. I've seen that right now the Java architects are trying to unify the ALGOL flavored Java with ML in the sense of algebraic data structures, pattern matching, local type inference. As you said, OCaml does not have a big community, library ecosystem. It also does not have the 100B$ garbage collectors of the JVM, which are a deal breaker, at least for me.

The complexity that comes from the zero-cost abstractions promoted by both C++ and Rust here isn’t in performance (not runtime nor compiletime) but in programmer reasoning and refactoring.

I agree with you, I believe that simulators, games, software that are "walled-gardens" in the sense that they don't have a lot of interactions with the external world aside from IO and netcode for multiplayer games (that's a pita though), will be usually better in a purely functional model. We must either stay single-threaded or adopt purely functional programming or transactions in those kind of systems. Now, this can be achieved in both C++ and Rust as those kind of systems are not "safety critical", C++ has the edge in metaprogramming while Rust is one step forward in moving the lifetime correctness on the programmer's turf. It's hard to make a point which one is better suited right now as both in my opinion are flawed and have their advantages, it gets evangelical pretty fast. One thing I know is that C++ has the upperhand just because of the sheer amount of libraries that exist in the space and its supporters like Autocad, Valve, Epic and other companies that have billion $ infrastructure built on it.

Right now I'm working with fax machines and I have to provide a C library which is consumed by Scala services. Neither C++ nor Rust would have been an advantage as we are familiar with other methods of verification which are more battletested.

This is why I prefer to write core components in C and then call them through the FFI available in the Java, Python or Node runtimes. Or you can go the "zero-cost abstraction" path which is the middle ground, like C++ or Rust, only that abstractions are not alaways zero cost and low level details will creep into the high level APIs. Different people, different preferences. Like seriously, the only reason I still use C++ is because of its HPC ecosystem coupled with its metaprogramming capabilities which are light years ahead from anything that is offered on the market in that department. This is also the reason why game development can't get out of the C++ trap.

The future of critical low-level programming is a better C or just plain simple C used in tandem with code generators like F*, deductive program verification like Why3 or just good old mathematics that many are irrationaly afraid of like TLA+.

I think PHP gets all the clapping when in fact the statistic that the majority of the Internet uses it to power its services is misleading. Let's face it, Wordpress is a great project, it could have been written in Perl and it would still have had the perks of being Wordpress. When people use it, they don't know what happens behind, I think WP is the perfect example of what a good extensible product is and how it can build an insane ecosystem around it. The plugin architecture is there since 2004, it was and still is very ergonomic. Though Wordpress was not unique in that time, phpBB, vBulletin should be mentioned.