Remarkable, sobering discussion of how hard it is to write bytes to a file robustly: https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/

APIs are subtle, filesystems have different safety modes, they sometimes discard errors, not everyone complies with POSIX, and sometimes hardware doesn't meet its spec!

The base ISA for RISC-V has been ratified, so there's a stability promise! https://riscv.org/2019/07/risc-v-foundation-announces-ratification-of-the-risc-v-base-isa-and-privileged-architecture-specifications/

Friday's xkcd is blunt but fair: it's very hard to secure any part of a modern computer stack, and we depend on all of it: https://m.xkcd.com/2166/

Looks like it was difficult for GitHub to maintain independence: it wasn't profitable for much of 2016: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-03/microsoft-is-said-to-have-agreed-to-acquire-coding-site-github