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There are many laws on the books that are ignored or in practice re-interpreted in the ground so that enforcement is only attempted in the most egregious situations.

Case in point: the “gedoogbeleid” for soft drugs. Contrary to many people’s belief, possession, sale etc of these are not legalised in the way that we see in many other jurisdictions. Yet, teenagers sit on the side of the canal near my old home getting happily stoned with their friends and say “hi” to passing police and “handhaving” city rule enforcement officers. They buy from the “coffeeshop” whose coffee making is more theoretical than practical, even though sales of the weed they buy are against the law. Sometimes inspectors will visit the shop to ensure that no tobacco is being smoked, but not being concerned about weed, with the threat of large fines or even loss of license to sell soft drugs (illegal, remember?) being withdrawn.

It’s all quite curious.

Reflecting on these words, it’s clear that many people take a “realist” perspective on power in and between human societies, and see no reason at all to strive to create better conditions for all or even most humans.

My take: it’s a luxury position that probably only makes sense if you’ve been a winner in the birth lottery of the global elite. They are the enablers of power-for-power’s sake populists and dead-eyed bureaucrats because they are certain, at least until too late, that bad things won’t happen to them of their loved ones.

Apologies, typo, ICJ -> ICC

I walked past the offices of Medcins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) incidentally across the road from the very good new Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, with posters in the windows imploring “no bombardment of hospitals in Gaza”.

The numbers are absurdly small, if hospitals were still operational, their employees not subject to extrajudicial killing from the occupation authorities and the facilities themselves not subject to bombardment.

Data from these killing fields is probably going to be far, far worse than we believe, once the dust has settled.

Justice has to be declared as an essential principle of human organisation.

If the 1984 vision of a boot stamping on a human face forever is going to work out to be true, then so be it.

The ICJ is at least holding out against that future.

What will you (as a human) choose to do?

These days and years are going to be definitional I think.

The Dutch have a very lackadaisical attitude to law, and at the very same time a very principled cut-off-my-nose-to-spite-my-face rule of law mentality.

If I were a senior Israeli or Hamas leader I’d avoid the place for a couple of decades in case of sealed charges.

Except for trams. They never seem to get the blame, however with their braking distance, I suppose it makes sense.

I’ve always thought of the Netherlands as Infrastructire Country, so much of that territory has been significantly altered over the last four or five thousand years that it’s leaked into their world view.

Problems can be solved with enough time, rough consensus and effort. It seems like such a weirdly outdated modernist view when living in other places.

I’ve worked in engineering businesses, and SaaS scale ups and the “engineering” that gets done by SWEs had little to nothing in common with any of the engineering disciplines I’ve worked in apart from the E in the title.

Little comprehension about cost engineering, maintenance, safety, durability and resilience. Half-baked bodies of knowledge. CV driven development. Fads and critical production systems held together with spit, tape and hope. It’s like Aristotle’s Cave in our field.

There’s a really interesting article that I’d like to read about the “first” - ongoing stakeholder management through the lifecycle of the project, the product and your time there all allow you to ship effectively (as far as the org sees it at least).

Focusing on the tech and even product UX minutiae doesn’t typically get the headspace you need from senior management for rolling down tech debt, the headcountb you need to really ship useful and market leading software.

802.1ag is a lot more recent, which helps!

Mind boggling. Social programming runs deep.

Totally get it that budgets are tight. But making sure that stuff happens isn’t highly correlated to tech staff or manager salaries.

Unless they’re hiring inexperienced high-schoolers, it’s a failure of will and competence in management. And even that would actually be a failure of managrnent.

I’m guessing - based on historic contacts with TfL - that this failure of management is probably manifest in too many meetings and intermediate products valorised over and above culture, knowledge and tech improvements.

Avoidance of outcome-based monitoring and governance, and instead a focus on “process execution” like reorgs, agonisingly-slow checkbox actions and deckchair relocations is pretty common in low-ambition, low-performance orgs. Again, you don’t get this because you’re being cheap on security people.

Lots of people who should have been establishing effective security practices and monitoring and improving it were doing … something … but not that.

Total failure of management and governance at TfL and the British Library (which even had a “private sector security leader” on its board of governors for a decade or more before their total shitshow of a breach last year)

But as usual, there will be no consequences.

Hey Bence, this is great. I’ve seen a few cloud exits done pretty badly and part of that was because for those teams and orgs it was something that they’d not really done before.

I like the listings of alternative technologies especially.

Well done!

It’s really interesting how tech has had a lot of special exemptions from rules that apply to normal businesses, and how these are being rolled back slowly.

On the face of it, having a product security obligation doesn’t seem too extreme, since most manufactured goods and service offerings operate under similar rules.

I’m a bit worried that the “move fast, break things” mindset in SaaS startups isn’t going to be easy to change, and that, in the context of product liability, might have big impacts on future profitability and valuations too.

And, spoiler alert, it’s not good, really!

John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist, regularly makes the point [0] that human evolution has accelerated enormously in the last 50k years.

Lactase metabolism is new, in the last 19k years. European skin colours and blue eyes appear to be very recent too, maybe 3.5k years.

Almost certainly there are all kinds of super interesting human evolutionary changes that are occurring now, with our huge population that won’t be visible for thousands of years…

[0] at least since this https://johnhawks.net/weblog/our-new-paper-on-why-human-evol...

Apparently the researchers are trying to widely disseminate the training for human echo location, but it appears their SEO could be better. I found some academic papers but no “shrink wrap” instruction on how to learn the skill.

Yeah, there’s a bit of a developer experience push going on in erlang world, which is great!

Hard to see them turning this around, it’s a good 10 year program (optimistically) to develop a new aerospace platform like a 737 replacement. I don’t really see it happening.

Does Embraer have a program in the works? I like what they build.

Nice. The two other relatively common issues I see from time to time with indie hackers are a lack of strong MFA authentication for janky PaaS where it’s not compulsory (leading to destruction of quite a bit of hard work) and never testing restores (ditto but for client data). HTH.

I like the framing here. I’ve been trying to get participants to declare their stakes more clearly up-front, upside and downside, and keeping that more or less updated as discussions and decision-making proceeds.

Interestingly, this hasn’t just been good for decision-making but has brought some hidden agendas out of the woodwork, where they do less damage and sometimes have led to really better understanding of problems that we’ve got.

Anybody else trying similar things?

I didn’t take a sabbatical as a founder, but as a relatively early hire. It was post-IPO but there were some really big hurdles left, and I was leading the tech side of getting over some of them, and an important but background player in quite a few more.

I found myself tired and thinly-spread. I did a lot of interventions throughout the business and in one case, one of our biggest customers, to make sure things would keep working out. Folks in my org couldn’t easily fill my shoes - mostly because it seemed hard to share that stuff - so it wasn’t looking good on a whole bunch of levels for me.

I think that “when it’s time, it’s time” and when that realisation comes, it’s pretty important to do something about it, consequences of not doing so can get grim quite fast.

I told my story to my favourite board members and sold the dream of rolling back some of the bus-factor if I were to take a nice, longish break.

The board - each of them - owed me big time for what I’d done, which may have helped, but I think that the dream of having more folks in my org able to do the tech, stakeholder and cultural work got them over the line in less than a week from suggestion to agreement.

I think my message here: what’s in it for them? Loyalty counts, but it might not be as strong a play as you hope.

I decided to roll off on (paid!!) six month sabbatical about 2 months later.

Those were pretty heavy weeks. I thought I could prep people for growth, change etc. Ha.

I also prepped my sabbatical by interviewing people I trusted who had taken breaks.

The best advice I got was:

- focus on mental plasticity to untangle from the last decade or more

- do new things that are potentially fun

- make bad art and poetry

- do something difficult

- do something intense

- write down some really big questions about what I wanted on my last day at work, put them in an envelope and look at them a few days before the sabbatical ends

- don’t sweat the changes that are bound to take place at $work

Coming back six months later after a lot of adventures and self discovery it became very clear that the genuinely refreshed, new me would get sucked right back in to bad old habits.

So I created a more realistic one year exit plan, got the board to buy into the little steps like all the different org consequences, but not letting them in on my decision to leave - loss of soft power can be a thing - and just after a stupidly high stakes sprint to cap off four years of work of hundreds of people, I did the mic drop. Did a bit of work travel to say goodbye to old colleagues around the world and moved on.

I’m a much happier, well-rounded person and professional now, very picky about the people and situations I choose to associate with. My next gigs weren’t walks in the park but I learned a lot and didn’t pick up much damage in the process of protecting and supporting good people.

Old $work is much more sustainable than if I hadn’t taken the time off and ultimately left. My former colleagues are mostly still there and growing into even more awesome folks than when I was there. All good!

Looks great; thanks for the unusually clear security story.

During sign up, the terms and conditions link seems to go to your landing page, normally I wouldn’t like it if I couldn’t skim them first.

Doing initial spin up, I’m not a Kubernetes sort of person, not sure what the “Kind” provider is, except that I hope it to be kind and nice, of course. The “provider” provider looks better, but it’s all guesswork for me. You’ve also got some lorem ipsum on the page too.

Quite happy about this development and that many of the passkey user vault vendors are participating.

It’ll be grimly interesting to see the new technical and social engineering attacks that will come very soon to make use of this capability, though.

Oh! comp.risks in a website. Amazing!

Great thesis on an interesting topic. I’m always a fan of good model explainability.

What did you use to generate the attractive and clear svgs?

This is genuinely an interesting take on both the rise of Trumpism as well as Marxism and the continuing threats to liberal democracy in the modern age.

I had studied the Zealots and the Cathars in history class (great high school!) in relation to the history of religion and politics, but never joined up the dots like this. Lots to think about.

A Vercel hostage situation?