Unsigned Commits

Commits cannot meaningfully be changed to become signed retroactively. Unlike an online website, they are part of a historical record, not an operating program. So we cannot establish the difference in treatment by changing how unsigned commits are treated.

Thinking of a website as an operating program is a new thought for me. “Static site generators” shape the thinking that websites are static. The request/response lifecycle that takes my html to your machine is not static. It’s alive!

That probably seemed like increasingly unhinged hyperbole, and it was.

This is a great sentence. Unhinged hyperbole respects unhinged hyperbole.

Just from a baseline utilitarian philosophical perspective, for a given action A, all else being equal, it’s always better not to do A, because taking an action always has some non-zero opportunity cost even if it is just the time taken to do it. Epsilon cost and zero benefit is still a net harm.

Opportunity costs and unpredictable second and third order effects are always present. This isn’t a reason to not take action. It is a reason to truly find value in the desired outcome of the action being taken.

What I am actually trying to point out here is that it is useful to carefully consider how to avoid adding junk complexity to your systems. One area where junk tends to leak in to designs and to cultures particularly easily is in intimidating subjects like trust and safety, where it is easy to get anxious and convince ourselves that piling on more stuff is safer than leaving things simple.

Less is more.