I was referring to the language you write playbooks in (YAML). There are no static checks, other than a dry-run that only tests for syntax errors. Frankly, I haven't heard of any provisioning system written in a compiled language. I wonder why.
NixOS kind of fits the bill (it can generate complete OS images from a recipe which is IIRC statically typed and "compiled")
If it looks waaaay different to puppet, ansible and chef, there's a reason for that :) Doing provisioning "properly" means managing every file on the drive...
I know about nix, but I'm referring to the language you use to describe the final image. Actually, this part is not a problem. The problem comes in the deployment part.
For example, there's no concept of `Maybe this request failed, you should handle it`. So when you run the deployment script, the request fails and the rest of your deployment process.
Defining the possibility of failure with a type system would force you to handle it in your deployment code and provide a backup solution.
sorry, I call the YAML playbooks config files sometimes. but yes, something that can compile down to the YAML files or other tools as well. Abstract away the abstraction basically.
I'm with you. I've been using Ansible for all my work the past 3 years and I haven't seen any thing that it hasn't been able to handle. It's incredibly flexible and if you use the inventory and variable precedence correctly then it can be very deterministic.
I've seen examples of how Ansible will keep recreating instances but that's only if you don't define what your infrastructure should look like in the inventory.
This is an old as time debate of "Security vs Convenience".
It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https? Same thing with letting Google start to categorize and selling your profile to organizations. It might be nice now, but in 5-10 years what will the landscape look like?
It's ultimately your choice to determine how much of your information you are willing to give up for the sake of convenience but you should think a little more about what the future could look like and start putting in some safeguards to protect yourself in the future.
> It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https?
I think that's a totally different issue and I think it's harmful to this discussion to bring such an issue in.
The case of http vs https is not one of user security vs user convenience; it's user security vs sysadmin convenience.
There's a different tradeoff with giving user's more security which is less convenient for you to maintain, and you typically should do this (this is stuff like https, supporting 2fa, etc).
The better comparison is sharing data with third parties to provide users conveniences. This is a comparison between user's data security and user's convenience. That's the tradeoff being discussed.
Bringing in unrelated things like http vs https will only serve to muddy the waters and damage your point.
Giving up privacy for most people is not a security reduction. Privacy is extremely important, but it is relevant only to a tiny minority of people who care about it or otherwise require it. Most people neither care nor use their rights to privacy, so in practice, losing it, for them, is no real loss. It is an increase in convenience—at no cost. The cost is a societal one, borne only when “no privacy” becomes a widespread default. As it stands, there are other browsers that offer better privacy for those who care about such things.
The NSA revelations shown that governments are doing mass surveillance for real and it is not just a nonsense conspiracy. Right now maybe only ver few might get affected by this. But if in the future the people in power use that information against you or your people you will regret it to exchange your privacy for convenience.
> if in the future the people in power use that information against you or your people you will regret it to exchange your privacy for convenience.
Alternatively if the people not in power have a revolution and murder all of us working in finance... well shucks I guess that could be something I'd regret.
Waving around arbitrary threats doesn't help if the people you're preaching to view them as low likelihood.
Privacy is related to security. The ability for anyone with a little technical knowledge to gain large amounts of data about you is a big security risk for individuals and society.
Like I said I'm a screen guy so I'm used to ctrl+a and I got my keymap remapped so that caps lock is ctrl so ctrl and a are right next to each other b is in the middle of the keyboard and I find it irritating having to press ctrl and b.
Also I don't use ctrl+a but the home key so I'm missing nothing.
I'm not too sure about that. Even in the past you would have kids who had more than the other kids. Toys have been with us humans for as long as we have been around. We are always manipulating objects around us.
If you took a kid from today and shot him 50 years ago, he may have an adjustment period, but he may just find himself interacting with the environment more.
Kids in the past probably had more creative uses out of their environment but put them in the digital world and their creativity wouldn't be there.
I wouldn't say that kids at any time period in human history were ever more creative. They were just creative about different things.
Toys always have been around, sure. But their quantity, variety and complexity (note: I include video games here) has massively increased through economic development. A hundred and twenty years ago the median American child might have had a rag-doll. Seventy or so, a teddy bear. Twenty years ago, a whole collection of dolls and toy-figures.
In so far as simpler toys require more imagination than complex toys, I still think that the effective level of creativity required of children has fallen. But I think the issue you've put forward is fair enough: there's not much* reason to believe that the potential level of creativity of children has fallen. Children might have much higher creative potential than they're currently exploiting, in which case they'd be able to adapt.
*: If performance on tasks involving creativity is positively related IQ, that coupled with the Flynn effect would suggest that creativity has increased over history. I call this "not much reason" because I'm not to sure why the Flynn effect exists and I don't think the researchers are sure yet either.
