
Doing Things That Scale - zanchey
https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2020/01/17/doing-things-that-scale/
======
SirensOfTitan
I may be generalizing too much, but I might sum up this post as: “uniformity
breeds resiliency”—and while I get what the author wants to get across, if
everyone had their setup, no one would be able to offer better font or icon
defaults as they would have never tinkered.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
to add to that, ... uniformity also breeds monoculture which is bad news for
attack surface. monoculture always enables exploitation at scale

~~~
zzzcpan
So, better way to say it is "uniformity breeds extinction".

------
michaelhoffman
I agree that contributing better defaults upstream definitely scales better
than maintaining one's own customized setup. Of course, those in control of
upstream don't always agree on what is "better" or what is a priority.

------
TearsInTheRain
There is no better feeling than when things just work right out of the box

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
for me it's when I have made something work, which nobody or only few people
have before me.

------
DyslexicAtheist
why would I care about scaling my dotfiles, my zsh custom prompt, or my icon
colors?

That those things don't scale is hardly news.

yak-shaving is fun and an experience in itself. not every activity needs to
scale.

I just wrote a netfilter_queue[1] based DNS filter in C[2] to extract
IDN/punicode domains from the kernel queue and drops the packet.

This is only useful to myself and maybe a handful of those who: run a local
resolver, disable DoH, and hate punicode/IDN with enough passion to actually
want to block it. But it has probably no use in the wider world because it
only adds complexity for them. According to this post, now I should feel bad
because it doesn't scale? What a strange way of looking at things.

[1]
[https://netfilter.org/projects/libnetfilter_queue/doxygen/ht...](https://netfilter.org/projects/libnetfilter_queue/doxygen/html/index.html))

~~~
rolandog
I don't mean to disagree... yak-shaving is fun, and you get to learn about the
internal workings of so many tools during the whole process (I myself am
trying to have every project 'make'-able, with self-documenting Makefiles).

But I see the point the author has made:

That personalized configurations are hard to recreate for other users,
particularly those that are less technologically adept.

And then, you're stuck maintaining everything...

