halilim

As a developer, I first thought about a different point when I saw the title. We usually use high-end devices that mask the performance issues in the software we develop. There is some effort and tooling, but I don't think it's enough.

Artificial limits or more regulation might not be the answer, yet post-AI scarcity can lead us to interesting places.

Yes. Google (and probably many other companies at this point) ask for your previous passwords as part of the account recovery flow. It's an additional factor to help establish that it's you and not a scammer trying to "recover" it.

So it's a good practice to save old passwords. Some password managers make it easier by having a password history feature, usually on the account's detail page.

Ubuntu is backed by Canonical Ltd. so it's corp vs. a much bigger corp. Linux as server vs Windows Server might be a more appropriate comparison for this.

Actually, there is http://linuxbrew.sh/, which is a fork of Homebrew, if one insists on using brew :) An advantage of brew over apt et al. I imagine would be simplicity, e.g. you don't need to add PPAs, import keys etc. Though I should add that in my limited experience with linuxbrew, I still had to deal with custom flags/builds/whatever in case of compatibility/version problems.

On a slightly unrelated note: aren't SSH keys meant to stay in the devices they are created, and you need to create new keys for new devices? Of course this is assuming that that SSH key was a private one.

I am divided on this. I think we as the software industry have serious performance issues, maybe except for some legitimate use cases like number crunching, video editing etc.

I don't know of a non-trivial Rails app which uses less than a couple hundred MBs of RAM. We have a VM with a minimum RAM requirement of 8 GBs at work which runs a conglomerate of Rails APIs, which makes 16 GB a minimum on my laptop. The only reason the memory bloat/leak of a freelance Rails project I'm working on goes undetected is that Heroku restarts their dynos daily. For comparison, an Elixir/Phoenix app is using < 40 MB right now.

AFAIK base RAM requirements of many Java apps are even worse.

Opening Gmail in Chrome immediately eats 1 GB of RAM, vs. 60 MB for Apple Mail app. Many Electron apps like Slack, Atom and Spotify use hundreds of MBs to GBs of memory, vs. 150 MB for Sublime Text (5 MB for Vim!). And they are sluggish. As much as I love the open web (and I'm mostly a web/backend dev myself), I hate the fact that I often have to prefer native apps.

I'm seriously considering other laptops right now, but can't find a serious alternative, especially considering the fact that there are no Linux-rated laptops close to my location. And shoehorning Linux into Windows machines is pain, I tried that for ~1 years both at work and at home. The best non-Mac laptop candidate I'm considering right now has a long article written by someone describing how to install Linux on it, with some "slight" annoyances like a non-functioning webcam and a problematic wifi in the end. Windows? Nothing there comes even close to iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh combo (and many other tools, workflows etc). And I haven't even touched the subject of design.

None of this is heavy computing. I think we seriously need to consider slowing down this madness and try to improve. I'd normally love the 16 GB limitation so that we'd be somewhat forced to that direction but since there is no "kill the bloat!" initiative or something, we sadly need beefier machines for the short/mid term.

Facebook was doing something similar (.php URL's). Should we avoid Facebook? Maybe. But for this reason? I was a PHP dev for nearly a decade and you can't possibly know the ways I hate it (unless you're a PHP dev too); but this is a very poor form of criticism.

I wrestled with Elastic Beanstalk 10 months ago for 2 days and had to give up in the end. Every deploy was dog-slow. And I was trying all kinds of things, imagine the frustration. Only certain versions of software are supported, though I downgraded just to test EB. But I still couldn't get it running in the end.

I can't recall a single time I had a problem deploying to Heroku, including the first deploys. Heroku is lightyears ahead of EB. Speaking of deployment, I might try Convox sometime in the future.

OTOH you can use RDS with Heroku, just be careful to have them in the same region.