Offering clarification is good, shitting on the article is bad.
The article does, in fact, do a perfectly fine job of explaining what a swift brick is. GP could easily have said “I couldn’t quite picture what a swift brick is”, but instead said “article did a poor job explaining swift bricks”, and that’s what they’re getting criticised for.
And here's yet another four-lowercase-letter-name for you, then. Dunno about the other two, but I've been using this handle for over twenty years, it was originally the auto-generated username I got assigned on one of my university's servers (generated from my initials).
Low character count handles are a scarce resource, and are often highly-sought after (people were paying crazy amounts for some names on twitter in its heyday). Almost any 2-, 3-, or 4-character sequence is going to be either a word or an abbreviation of something that's meaningful to someone out there.
My current Ghostty session on macOS is holding on to 127.8 MiB of real memory, and only 37.5 MiB of private memory. What's the Linux build up to that makes up for that difference?
Software engineers at large would benefit from playing World of Warcraft, and seeing the ongoing fight between Blizzard and add-on authors.
WoW's whole UI is built in the same Lua environment as add-ons, and Blizzard has implemented some interesting restrictions (like the taint system[0]) to prevent add-ons from completely automating gameplay.
World of Warcraft is one of the most popular MMO's ever made.
You simply can't expect every software that wants a plugin system to have the same security practices as the most used software in the world.
In fact, there are many reasons why you might want a plugin to have full filesystem and internet access, such as batch processing or simply adding things directly from webpages. Sandboxing this will just make plugins less useful.
In the end it's a problem of trust. You're installing software from untrustworthy developers because you trust the name of the application those plugins are associated with.
You could fix the problem in Obsidian, but the same problem will happen in other software. Some of which simply can't justify bothering with sandboxing plugins. This is just the way plugins are.
> You simply can't expect every software that wants a plugin system to have the same security practices as the most used software in the world.
I'm not saying that I think they should, or that I expect them to. I'm saying that it's one particular implementation of sandboxing that has a bunch of interesting properties, and that makes it worth studying.
If you happen to use the WoW example in the future, the wiki efforts moved from the fandom one to wiki.gg[0], as voted by maintainers and contributors in late 2023[1].
Thanks! I've been meaning to read up on taint systems, looks interesting :)
I'm somewhat convinced that taint-influenced capabilities is a good future model to pursue. Computers are fast, I'm fairly confident that it chould be done at whole-computer scale and still be reasonable... though probably not with a million electron apps. Which is likely a good thing in aggregate (I say as a fan of web tech and the very compelling features such things offer. Great for minor or PoC, not for major pieces of software).
> Partly because it was founded (in part) by oppressed minorities fleeing states where the were constantly harassed by authorities
Nah, it's a principle that was brought in from English common law. E.g Blackstone's Ratio[0] was published at roughly the same time as the American revolution was playing out, and cited plenty of earlier formulations of the same principle. Habeas Corpus was codified in the Magna Carta, but predated it as a concept.
Now I'm entertaining myself by reframing the rebel barons (magna carta) as an oppressed minority, fleeing into their castles where they get harassed by siege engines.
That's the summary from the article, and directly contradicts your point that they're snubbing all software.
reply