Observations
Not original thoughts, I am sure, but ...
1. Email users—even senior, supposedly well-educated, qualified people with heavy responsibilities and big jobs—still absolutely refuse to understand that email is horrifically insecure, that you should trust nothing to email that you wouldn't be happy to see on a billboard; but that there are relatively cheap, simple to set up and easy to use mechanisms to (a) encrypt your messages and (b) sign them digitally so that others cannot implement masquerades. I was dealing with a law firm last month and even they thought it was ok to use email for legal documents. It is unbelievable. What is wrong with these people?
2. It will be supremely ironic if the appalling security flaws in chips (no, Intel they are not features, you lying b*****ds), which have to be "corrected" with patches which put a serious dent in CPU throughput, lead to a rennaissance of competent performance-conscious programming. If we see more articles about this or that OS/kernel/application having been tweaked, modified, rewritten, optmised, whatever, to provide a (say) 15% speed-up to mitigate the effects of Spectre/Meltdown patch, the question will be: if it was that easy to make this stuff work faster—if it was that fat, stodgy, inefficient and badly written in the first place—why on earth didn't you sort this out sooner? How much other lazy, sluggish garbage is running on our machines, picking its nose over a 618Mb library-for-the-lazy, when it could have been written for one-tenth the disk space and five times the speed?
I have a feeling we all know that a vast amount of modern code is third-rate shit which gets away with being obese dross because it depends upon using tiny fractions of enormous, bloated libraries and runs on very fast silicon with forgiving OSs. If there's an upside to Intel and others' monumental screwup with chip design, it may be that we'll see a return to professional coders writing really good stuff.
Well ... I can hope.