Completely boring technology: aurutils, bash (with bash-it), bat, cp, git, grep, head, man, mv, pacman, rm, rsync, ssh, sudo, tmux, tree, vim.

On what would the browser user base their decision?

If an extension injects an icon into the DOM of the page, then the resulting `img` tag needs to put something in its `src`.

The extension author may choose to use the `data:` scheme, but that's a development-time decision.

Back then, many programmers originally learned their ropes in an 8-bit home computer era (or earlier), where it used to be completely normal and even necessary that you used whatever memory region you got away with.

For example, on the C64, you would get away with using the memory locations $02, $2A, $52, $FB to $FE, $02A7 to $02FF, and $0313 as scratch space for your own programs. Memory was incredibly scarce. I can’t blame programmers for sticking with their habits and for taking several years to unlearn and adjust their misconceptions about who owns what if they came from a home computer era where that pattern used to be the only way to get stuff done.

> Those can all be filed under Not My Problem (as in, Microsoft's problem,) and safely ignored.

It was absolutely Microsoft’s problem. Had it ignored compatibility issues, what incentives would users have had to buy Windows 95?

I am now migrating all my unencrypted secrets on my machines to encrypted ones. If a tool supports scripted credential providers (e.g. aws-cli or Ansible), I use that feature. Otherwise, I wrap the executable with a script that runs gpg --decrypt and injects an environment variable.

That way, I can at least limit the blast radius when (not if) I catch an infostealer.

Defending against a targeted attack is difficult, yes. But these recent campaigns were all directed at everyone. Auditing and inspecting your dependencies does absolutely help thwart that because there will always be people who don't.

And, of course, Germans have a dedicated composite noun for it: Kabelbaum (literal translation: cable tree).

I always like to point out that Germans don’t, in fact, have a word for everything.

It’s just a phrase or sentence with spaces removed.

Knowhatimsayin.

In German that's called Wortbildungsfähigkeit, or in English, WordStructureCapability

There's more to a function than just types. It's not sufficient to know that the function outputs a baz 42.0. You have to understand which one. The oldest? The latest? The one that matches the foo and bar input parameters?

I think that's the part where it remains difficult. Someone has to convey clearly what the semantics and side effects of the function are. Consumers have to read and understand it. Failing that, you get breakage.

If there is anything to know about the type register sub types for each.

Like the way we say something is an mp3. Why would it be good to have one unifying concept where we pretend a car crash and Beethoven are the same thing? It can be a WAV too!

Do you prefer hard or soft cover books?

If I have two functions `GetCurrentBaz()` and `GetPreviousBaz()`, then I’m certainly not going to register `CurrentBaz` and `PreviousBaz` subtypes.

Those semantics are not properties of the type.

> There were precursors like Aider and early Cursor, but they were more assistant than agent.

I use Aider on my private computers and Copilot at work. Both feel equally powerful when configured with a decent frontier model. Are they really generations apart? What am I missing?

> Turning off all caching layers and opting in where really needed is a good starting strategy.

An even better strategy might be to gather some evidence up front to learn what actually causes the slowdowns before you start implementing something.