Computing is a lot like American cities, in the that the infrastructure (yak shaves) that would make everything easier are almost invariably under-invested. On

Computing is a lot like American cities, in the that the infrastructure (yak shaves) that would make everything easier are almost invariably under-invested. One of my favorite examples would https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsicum_(Unix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsicum_(Unix). It's incremental which is good. But people wrote the kernel part and declared mission accomplished like Bush in 2003, ludicrous! One has to do that and then overhaul the userland and either get those patches upstreamed. And these days "userland" isn't a collection of init, shitty scripts and Gtk/Qt, but a bunch of libraries, especially programming language standard libraries. This would dramatically change the security and ergonomics landscape, because so much global state programmers "Containers" was always the wrong metaphor because software is about composition, but containers are inert and only their mass and volume composes (very crude). Better to think about plumbing or rail. Another perhaps more opinionated example is getting everyone to use Nix (or fine, something like it.) Whether with container style virtual global state, or nicer capsicum, we need to make it trivial to install and develop the entire commons. All "builds on my machine but you can use it" just leads to a lack of integration so no one can help the original author smooth over the gaps. It will also allow machines to be demystified, allowing people to toy with all the software on the system, which will help reduce the programmer alienation which allows so much accidental complexity to occur in the first place. But yeah, almost nobody is doing these things at the scale they deserve, and even the megacorps drown in their own technical debt like sunbelt cities that are just metastasized suburbs. Eveyrone is in the "well I'll eat shit and shut up as long as my competitor is too" mind site. It's disgusting.