If anything, this is evidence that coding elegance has value.

The unexpected part here being that AI brings specks of elegance to a terrible, inelegant codebase.

> Signal can have a stigma "I don't do anything illegal, so why should I bother ..."

Aside: I see similar attitudes when I mention I use VPN all of the time

It's quite common if you work in a team of engineers, or in a large company with many engineers.

Having consistent machine and OS and app configurations enables better (lower cost, higher reliability) scripting and tooling solutions in things like repos and infrastructure.

Not unlike consistency in language and compiler choices.

Tangentially, I did this once years ago.

I had consumed a large amount of spicy food the day prior, and it pulled the fire alarm right in the middle of a phone screen. I foolishly thought I could silently and secretly handle both tasks at once.

These were the days before background noise filters. The poor candidate obviously heard unpleasant things but neither of us acknowledged it directly.

He accepted the job though. But this still bothers me decades later. Never again!

My favorite (or perhaps most regrettable) example of this is Albert Einstein.

Obviously brilliant, but a real piece of shit when it came to women and fatherhood.

Still, I can appreciate his scientific work nonetheless.

You're right. But there's a generational aspect to this too.

Younger generations won't touch Facebook. It's seen as a platform for "old" people. So Facebook is on a modest decline. (Enter Instagram and Tiktok and all that to fill the void...)

Younger western generations perhaps. 3 billion people use Facebook still.

This is a myth. Unless people in their 20s are now considered old.

> Remind me, which Ferengi Rule of Acquisition is this?

You made my morning with this quip.

Oddly enough, I observe something to the opposite effect.

I wonder if it has more to do with proximity to edge delivery nodes than anything else.

I use Mozilla VPN and I've been noticing this trend more and more. Especially for auth endpoints.

What sources are you basing this on?