My guess? He shared the Google Doc link with his peers, but forgot that Google Docs links are public for anyone who knows the link, so someone just forwarded it to oblivion, and he was forced to publish that as blog post. The addendums kind of reflect that.

That's a great reminded that any Google Doc with a shareable link is basically a public document for all intents and purposes.

https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/features.html

To the author's defense: Cockpit is Linux only, and they seem to intend on making this also available on Windows and Mac.

Still, I don't see the appeal they seem to do, especially since it relies so much on SSH. The biggest use case I can think for something like this in the real world is something like first-time setup or MDM, and on both situations setting up SSH to begin with has the same level of friction they're trying to remove.

Everything they mention as "missing", or "novel" has been part of Cockpit for over a decade, from socket-based web server connection, backend-frontend separation for server apps and the whole idea of a server console with shell access itself.

To answer them: "Isn’t it weird that this doesn’t already exist?" - No, it's not, because it has existed for ages.

Management just really needs to make the next earnings look like what it should look. Next quarter is next quarter's problem.

`make dotfiles` just creates a bunch of symlinks, takes 5 minutes, all good and happy. Everything is modular, declarative, simple. Never looked back.

Because this is not targetted to humans. It's targetted to agents. They just need to appear on a fraction of the searches agents do to add dependencies and get lucky a couple times to start a new infection cluster.

Then to the more interesting question: why now?

1. Agents, agents everywhere.

2. MAJOR elections happening this year in the World, including US midterms and Brazilian mains. This appears to be an account-stealer worm - and my guess is it's looking to all those sweet sweet Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok/Whatsapp accounts ready to bot their way into oblivion.

When I read it, I interpreted it as "let's encrypt bans certificate usage in - any territories endorsed by the US". Took me reading a couple comments to understand it actually meant "territories under US sanctions".

Think about it. If you're paying all your bills, all your wages, and you have a strong product that people enjoy, and you're able to compete in the market - maybe not gaining any ground, but at least not losing any either - why change?

Of course I moderately understand the market pressures at work, but at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time.

That said, the limitations are kind of obvious and are starting to show in some of my projects, and this article seems to confirm my suspicions. If it's just confirmation bias or not, I can't say yet.

In my experience, for anything complex enough, I have to start adding more and more constraints, style guides, corner cases, error handling, optimization guidelines and all this good stuff to my Markdown specifications, rules and skills. At some point this starts to look like we're all just moving complexity from the more formal and deterministic world of programming languages to the informal and non-deterministic world of natural language. The writing speed gains are enormous, yeah, and business sees this as productivity gains, of course - and we do it because the pressure for increased productivity is there, as it's always been; yet the trade off seems to be clear and a lot of people are just ignoring it.

https://github.com/apache/superset

Developers writing software on 64GB M4 Macs often don't realize the performance bottlenecks of the software they write.

Developers working over 1gbps Internet connections often don't realize the data gluttony of the software they write.

Developers writing services over unlimited cloud budgets often don't realize the resource wastes into which their software incurrs.

And to extend this to society in general.

Rich people with nice things often alienate themselves from the reality of the majority of people in the World.