Assorted replies and acknowledgements ------------------------------------- Tomasino wrote about tabs vs spaces[1], and tfurrows weighed in on the subject too[2]. I am a bit of a heretic about this. I am primarily a Python programmer (although, at least in principle, I am supposed to be shifting effort to Lua and/or Go to better prepare myself for programming in confined spaces. Contrary to what Tomasino said, the Python language spec doesn't require spaces - the interpreter will happily accept tabs, and will even let you mix tabs and spaces within a file, so long as you don't mix them on the same line. However, the official style guide declares spaces to be the preferred good style, and the community is pretty fanatical about enforcing this. You will be a pariah in the Python FOSS community if you insist on using tabs, and so 99% of code does not. Personally, I think this is totally backward and if I had the power, I would convert the entire Python community to using tabs. The main reason is that it is the default of every sane editor on every platform from any point in computing history that pressing the "tab" character (which is, of course, how every sane programmer indents their code) generates - what else? - a tab? Getting the "correct" Pythonic behaviour requires configuring your editor to act in a non-standard way, ideally only for .py files. Now, this is easily done in any text editor worth using, but it is problematic in that it is very easy to not set this up *everywhere*. You can (and I have), write a Python script on your main development machine, where your .vimrc is all happily pimped out for producing lovely .py files, deploy that script on a server somewhere and, later, while ssh'ed into that machine, quickly and unthinkingly make a small tweak/fix in default vim, thus introducing tabs amongst the spaces. You can't see that this has happened, until your code starts acting screwy because it isn't indented as many characters as you think it is. This can be a nightmare of a bug. And obviously in a Real Proper Development Environment with Serious Business apps you don't do this, debugging directly on the production server with an uncustomised editor. But in a hobby project environment, everyone does this from time to time. It shouldn't really be that big a deal. But with Python, it is, and I hate it. Any programming convention which results in source files which can be subtly and invisibly corrupted by editing them with a default install of either of the two most popular editors in *nixdom is ipso facto a *bad convention* and should not be adopted despite any other arguments in its favour. Sorry, Python community, but this is just obviously true. tfurrows wondered if one approach was more portable than the other. I'd be happy to learn otherwise, but I am pretty sure there is no difference - they are both standard ASCII characters. yargo[3] and tfurrows[4] wrote about decentralisation of the public access unix scene, and tfurrows mentioned "SDF gets a lot of participation, but it's hard to get participation on some of the other systems out there". This is very true. SDF is, as far as I know, by far the most active and best-known of all the public access systems, and I am pretty sure that the imbalance is totally out of proportion to the quality of the systems. SDF is by no means terrible, but it has its fair share of problems and I have a hard time believing that every other system is far worse. Most likely, what is responsible here is the fact that PAU systems unfortunately tend to share the "network effect" that drives commecial social media. Things like BBOARD and COM are only visible to other users of the same system (I have written about this before[5]). If you join a system with a large userbase, you can communiate with a lot of people about a lot of things. If you join a smaller, newer system, you will have nobody to talk to. This leads to a "rich get richer" effect, where people preferentially join large, established communities even if arguably superior smaller communities exist. This is a *very* powerful effect. Even Google, with absurd amounts of money and brainpower, couldn't beat this effect displace Facebook. I think it's unfortunate that our systems have this effect in common, I think it hampers decentralisation, but I don't know what to do about it. Finally, tfurrows wrote[6] about disk encryption, in the context of imagining "Big Brother" accessing his files. I think it's a genuine tragedy that these kinds of thought experiments can no longer be dismissed off the cuff. Once upon a time, if the government wanted to spy on you, they had to send goons to stealthily break into your house and plant bugs or cameras. Then men with sunglasses in large white vans had to sit on the street out your house to receive the signals. This kind of spying doesn't scale well. You have to buy bugs and vans, and pay your goons salaries. Spying on twice as many people costs roughly twice as much. Any intelligence agency with a finite budget has a limited number of people they can spy on per year. If the agency is rational, they will target "important" people (according to some notion of who they "should" be spying on, whether you agree with that notion or not). Unless you are involved in heavy crimes or perhaps are an active political dissident, basic economics is enough to very strongly suggest that you are not being spied upon. All of this logic is out the window today. Most people voluntarily, and at their own expense, surround themselves almost constantly with a significant number of internet-connected devices running closed source software and equipped with cameras and/or microphones. We are footing the bill for our own bugs. Yes, the spooks have to find a way to defeat whatever security these devices come with, and that might be very hard and expensive. But once it's done for a common enough device, it can be applied to millions of targets at very little extra cost. It's actually economically viable to spy on a non-trivial number of "complete nobodies", just in case. This *could* be done, so it probably is. Whereas once you had to be a little irrational to believe Big Brother was watching little old *you*, nowadays you have to be pretty technologically illiterate to think in the same way. We've ended up in a world where the more you know about computer security, the *easier* it is to convince yourself a vast surveillance apparatus is bearing down on you. That's a terribly psychologically unhealthy world to live in, IMHO. [1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180729-tabs-vs-spaces [2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/tfurrows/phlog/2018/ah6_spacesAndTabs.txt [3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~yargo/clog/zn-on-time-flu.txt [4] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/tfurrows/phlog/2018/ah6_redundantPubnix.txt [5] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/two-walls-good-four-walls-bad.txt [6] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/tfurrows/phlog/2018/ah9_diskEncryption.txt