This isn't an insolvable problem, but the carbon-based energy sector will be big losers, and they're fighting tooth and nail against it.

An awful lot of our politics and geopolitics right now is symptomatic of the carbon energy sector fighting against the reality that it needs to die for the good of the human race, but it is also extraordinarily powerful.

> We do not accept requests to release, transfer, or reclaim usernames on the basis that they appear inactive or unused. If the username you want has already been claimed, you will need to select a different available name unless you are submitting a trademark complaint as described below.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g...

Also even the original user renames or deletes their account any popular repos they have will get tombstoned, so the new owner can't recreate them:

> GitHub uses a tombstoning algorithm to reduce the risk of repo-jacking by permanently retiring specific owner name, repository name combinations. The github/cmark-gfm example above is purely hypothetical, because, in that scenario, the old name would get automatically tombstoned. For example, even if an attacker managed to register the username github, they would still be prevented from creating a new repository with the name cmark-gfm because that owner name, repository name combination (github/cmark-gfm) would be permanently retired. Therefore, repo-jacking is only a risk for repositories that fall below a certain usage threshold. We don’t tombstone all renamed repositories because there’s a tradeoff between usability and security: a tombstone is a potential inconvenience for our users which we don’t want to impose unless there’s a genuine security-related reason to do so. That’s why our tombstoning policy only kicks in after the repository has met certain criteria, such as exceeding a specific number of clones.

https://github.blog/security/supply-chain-security/how-to-st...

Yeah, every now and then you blow out the window limits. So you take a break and think about something else or go out and do something else...

Arguing against that, probably comes from a cynical neoliberal perspective where the Democratic Party can't change because the argument assumes that the Democratic Party can't change.

And the alternative is definitely outright fascism and the suspension of Democracy. They've told us what they're planning on doing, just like we knew they wanted to get rid of Roe vs. Wade, we just accepted the lies about it being settled law and a political football.

If you're not willing to vote against that, then you're comfortably middle class and don't think you'll be one of the ones that are going to be hurt.

I've voted against Trump 3 times and threw money behind trying to get Sanders the nomination in 2020 instead of Biden, so when all the horrible stuff has been going down this term I don't have to tie myself in knots with rationalizations about my actions.

GitHub also actually protects against repojacking and tombstones username/reponame combinations (that exceed a certain minimum popularity) and never lets anyone ever use them again.

The utility of AUR is also really based around being able to reuse the same repo without having to re-vet every single time. This kind of attack, that forces you to re-vet on every single upgrade so that trust inherently can't be established, is also not GitHub's model at all.

And go has a software package manager that heavily uses GH for distribution, and is arguably more VCS decentralized, but isn't vulnerable to this kind of attack, because it inherts GH's threat model, and doesn't implement the kind of choices that AUR decided to deliberately build into their system.

Okay, let's try being slightly less permissive in our firearm laws then, since you've just proven it works.

This is also a terrible way to run a package build system in this day and age as well, if you like. I feel exactly the same way about it, and when I wrote that I understood what it was, so I didn't need that helpful correction (I first used the FreeBSD ports system sometime around the turn of the millennia).

Tried that in 2000, voting for Nader as a protest vote against Clinton/Gore third way neoliberalism. I did that in a state where the electoral votes for Dems were 100% safe. Still just got blamed for Bush and there was zero self-reflection on the part of the Democratic Party.

...

I would urge everyone to stop fixating on the Presidential vote as the only fight to win and everything being win/lose based on that outcome. If the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House exceeds 50% of Democrats in the House, then we can start thinking about a world where e.g. AOC might be the speaker of the House rather than Nancy Pelosi.

> It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election.

Yeah, and the Office of the President is 4-8 years and is just more short-termism, along with individualism / cult of personality / CEO-leadership. If you want to make lasting change in the DNC, start by flipping more and more House seats to progressive from neoliberal.

Maintainers need to have some level of vetting, and should own a repo or three for a while to establish a track record, before they get to blast out contributions to 100 of them without any review.

Most of us don't need a model that can prove the Riemann hypothesis or Goldbach's conjecture in order to get work done.

The problem is that anyone trying to actually be better is usually inconsistent and hypocritical at some level as in that "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" comic.

If you attempt to filter out all traces of hypocrisy from your trusted sources, you wind up listening to the absolute worst people.

The people trying to do better are usually the ones struggling with conflicts and inconsistencies.

Graph it without the logarithmic scale and draw a curve through the 1982-2018 data and the recent spike will explain why people are complaining about it.

If we need to spend just as much on salaries, while shelling out $700B/yr on AI, how does all that spending get paid for?

In 10 years, we probably will have $700B/yr in productivity gains and revenue from LLMs, but we're not going to be able to sustain $700B/yr in capital spending until we get there. And the problem is much worse than the fiber buildout of the late 90s. Fiber built out in 1998 was still usable 10 years later. The GPUs that are being built out today are going to be obsolete trash in 3 years.

the vast majority of companies only make solid near-glued together phones, so that is all anyone buys.

if apple made a phone with replaceable batteries with a bit more thickness and some compromises on water resistance vs. cost, you'd actually see the consumer preferences play out.

> The folds do add functionality and I think there's an impulse that leads people to say they don't see the point of something just because they're not interested in it personally.

you're going to have to go through some real mental contortions to support foldable phones as consumer choice while treating repairability/replaceability as inherently not worth it because you like slim designs.

For GH issues you can always navigate back to the PR discussion (which should have linked issues and other pointers in it) from the commit.

Of course when we switched to GH issues, we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted. Now all those JIRA tags are entirely useless.

IMO that actually argues for tight coupling between your issue tracker and your git repo. And what you really want is portability (which I don't see how you get other than with tight coupling). Ideally there would be open standardized formats, but as it is, github is the 800# gorilla that defines the format and as long as gitlab and other clones can slurp in github project metadata (or at least PRs) then that effectively gets you closer.

But any way... Fixed, immutable pointers to an Atlassian product that you might not be using in 5 years is not a good policy. I'd sooner accept the policy that the git commits needed to stand entirely on their own and all the information about the "why" of the change needed to be baked into the git commit or the comments in the source (I think that fails, though, since everyone is overly terse in git commits and summarizes issues and loses information--and the back-and-forth dialog in a PR discussion is useful because it contains more than just one person's voice summarizing the reason for the change).