The problem is that everyone outside the G7 lives under the constant threat of ever-expanding US sanctions. Successful open source projects will likely find ways to avoid being told who they can or cannot have contribute to them.

The problem though is that since one has a number of passwords which may be different but closely related, a human may be able to infer a few possible passwords from a few compromised ones. In other words it still dramatically shrinks the key space an attacker might want to try to brute force. Preventing re-use is then a problem for 2fa regimes.

For my part I won't use passwords I cannot memorize and keep memorized in relation to the web site.

The idea in systems which have this rule is that contracts are exchanges of promises and there must be an exchange in order to be valid.

First thing you do in a crisis? Take a few breaths and calm down. Take the pressure off of yourself. Agree to a timeline and start gathering ideas. Brainstorm. Engage in risk assessment. Then decide, act, and re-evaluate.

I try hard to work with projects which are not Western-centric for this reason or at least which have a commitment to a community which admits of disagreement on issues.

Accidents will happen. One thing that will be important going forward is a proper operational response to the problem and this is likely to become more complicated as time goes on. After all if these have been on the road for 5 years, would it really be necessary then to stop operations?

Hand-written SQL means a bunch of work and you have to know SQL. But it is simple and transparent.

ORMs automate a lot of simple and repetitive SQL, but to use them effectively you really have to know SQL extremely well and understand the ORM deeply as well.

So I guess it depends on what you are doing. ORMs can be useful but they require a lot more knowledge to use effectively than hand-coded SQL does.

Now, that safely describes a modern, optimizing C compiler.....

Even the organizations that I have worked for that have been better at this than others have still struggled. Perhaps there is room to just point out that high-level architects need to be involved in people and organization decisions.

In the end, flatter organizations are better, but structure of both organizations and software are hard problems and things that we struggle with throughout our careers on either track. I have usually fought to have ICs report at every level so that part makes sense.

But the question becomes what you replace middle management with? The answer shouldn't be "chaos."

I think you know what "The West" is when you are outside it. If you look at which countries are sanctioning Russia, it overlaps almost entirely with that list (i.e. that list of states minus Japan and Korea though some folks might argue that Japan and Korea are in fact Western -- not including quasi-states like North Korea or Taiwan in that assessment). That doesn't say

'"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.'

Certainly there is less than in the US due to the fact that free speech law binds the private sector as well as the public sector and that, in theory, discrimination on the basis of political or other opinion is forbidden.

That being said, I watched protests during the Covid years treated differently depending on political views. In essence protests for in-favor causes were given go-aheads while protests for out-of-favor causes were restricted or banned. This may be changing now in Germany at least for the better.

I don't like the far-right but when legal far-right parties are restricted in an ability to rally because political opponents to them blame the spread of Covid on them (overlooking more likely causes like cross-border commuting to a country with far higher problems), then I get nervous since usually I find myself, more often than not, fairly far left economically at least.

Hong Kong was not the only place to have high death rates from Omicron. New Zealand did as well. But none of the countries which had difficulty controlling earlier Covid outbreaks did.

We are often prisoners of our own successes more than we are victims of our errors.

What I see in Southeast Asia, though, is quite different. While there is a lot of uncertainty about the direction of global geopolitics, and while this also has a strong effort at finding a direction towards economic development on their own terms. Indonesia is becoming increasingly assertive in this regard, for example banning export of nickel ore (and ending up in a legal fight with the EU over that), and planning to do the same for bauxite soon as well. These bans are designed to ensure that those who want to exploit the nation's natural resources have to contribute directly to its economic development on Indonesian and not WTO, US, or EU terms.

Indonesian approaches to social management and rule of law are still quite foreign to me but these (even more than in the US) are very decentralized. A majority of the population still works independently or for small family businesses though the largest employer is the government. I still struggle with the disconnect between rules and laws. But the optimism here, in part born by the hope that the legacy of colonialism may finally be drawing to a close, is contagious.

I think sometimes leaving the great powers can be liberating.

As a result drunk individuals usually are facing narrow technical problems where thinking is required, and judgments already made, while tired people are facing the whole situation.

At least that's my experience based on fighting weird bugs on managed database services.