This meant that it was costly to maintain and caused a lot of confusion, especially with internal dependencies (shared libraries): this is the trade-off they did not like and wanted to move away from.
They moved away from this in multiple steps, first one of those being making it a "distributed monolith" (as per your implied definition) by putting services in a monorepo and then making them use the same dependency versions (before finally making them a single service too).
I was one of the engineers who helped make the decisions around this migration. There is no one size fits all. We believed in that thinking originally, but after observing how things played out, decided to make different trade-offs.
Whats coming?
Gift cards are often used for money laundering or scams, because they allow to transfer monetary value in small increments and without tracking: there's no link between the person who bought a gift card (anonymously with cash) and a person who used its code to put money onto an account.
I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days.
I don’t even want to think about pgp when I have to manually take care of this problem. Not because of my own skills, but because I could never make it reliable for my family and friends on their side.
Signal's threat model is that everything around you is hostile to you, except the parties you interact with. You are an undercover rebel in a totalitarian sect which would sacrifice you to Cthulhu if they see your chat history. Losing it is much better than disclosing it.
Your threat model is likely random black hat hackers who would try to get into your communication channels and dig some dirt to blackmail you, or to impersonate you to scam your grandmother out of several thousand dollars. Signal protects quite well against it. But the chance of this happening even in an unencrypted channel is low enough. You don't mind making the security posture somehow weaker, but preserve the possibility to restore your chat history if your secure device is lost or destroyed.
I suppose the problem could be solved by an encrypted backup with a long key which you keep on a piece of paper in your wallet, and / or in a bank in a safe deposit box. Ideally it would be in the format that the `age` utility supports.
But there is no way around that paper with the long code. If this code is stored on your device, and can be copied, it will be copied by some exploit. No matter how inconspicuous a backdoor you are making, somebody will find it and sneak into it. Should it happen in a publicized case, the public opinion will be "XYZ is insecure, run away from it!".
Not at all. A simple peer to peer protocol based on proximity and mixing in traffic data distributed like the national weather service will do just fine.
These convoys seem like a perfect example of swarm algorithms fitting well where you don’t need a central coordinator.
We are below $1B/GW for solar. China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year.
Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years
1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
Three more were built in EU since 2000: one in Finland (Swedish/Finnish design) and two in Slovakia (Soviet/Russian design).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Bulk prices at exchanges are way lower, like 2.2¢ per kWh: https://www.ieso.ca/Power-Data/Price-Overview/Ontario-Market...