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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Well, that explains Bruce Schneier's most recent blog post "Improving C++". I'm generally a fan of Rust, but acknowledge there's a lot of existing code in C/C++ and rewriting code that works is asking for trouble; we should be making sure we have the tooling to retrofit the appropriate checks into existing code. That is, updating to C++29 or whatever is almost certainly going to be easier and less error-prone than porting to Rust.


Tivoization is the term for the problem you're talking about. And free software advocates have been raging against it since, uh, you could actually find someone who could remember the last time they saw a TiVo. With the recent EU fight with Apple and the Right to Repair movement in the US, it looks like there's a small push in the other direction at the moment. But that's not very reassuring.

It is weird to see an anti-government anti-Tivoization rant given that I've always seen it as an anti-corporate position.

It is weird to see an anti-government anti-Tivoization rant given that I've always seen it as an anti-corporate position.

From some perspectives, there is little separation of business and state, so maybe this shouldn't be so surprising.