I would laugh, but I've met too many people who either adore busywork or worse - seem to think no amount of additional manual stuff that one has to do will ever be a problem.
Honestly it needed an LLM to tell me that it is satire, because I tuned out at the 20% mark.
The author seems to be so deep in the radioactive weeds that even if it is satire and they're distancing themself from it, they're still likely to already have experienced a near-lethal dose.
Worded differently, I would argue that anyone who sees this and _understands it_ is stuck in something very unhealthy and needs to get out very fast. Using this level of satire as a coping mechanism just prolongs what shouldn't be prolonged (or exist in the first place).
I stopped there and had to read the answers to my comment to find out and revisit it. In hindsight, this is absolutely hilarious. Might be one of my new favorite pieces of software satire (because of how realistic, albeit absurd, it is).
This is why you shouldn't waste your money on expensive "consultants" like this guy.
We've had 100% success in reducing Dependabot noise by disabling it in our repos. Why should we pay this guy to configure it for us and still end up with Pull Requests being opened?
At sufficient scale, Dependabot’s analysis will time out before completing, effectively rate-limiting the number of PRs it can generate. This natural throttling prevents notification fatigue while maintaining the appearance of active security tooling.
Had fun reading this, pretty well written.
>Consolidate into a monorepo
lol this sounds like as if you make a dog tired by playing with it so it sleeps which you're gone :'D
>Contextualize the actual risk
This is not as easy as it seems, for example reflection cases where runtime behavior affects a package usage.
example:
const lib = require(process.env.PARSER)
lib.parse(userInput) could use a safe parser in production or a vulnerable one in another environment, but from a code level perspective there's no certainity which package is actually used
I don’t have experience with dependabot at all. I didn’t realize it was satire. I just kept thinking, “This sounds like terrible advice. This can’t be right.”
> but to be on the safe side we recommend extending [dependency cooldowns] to at least 30 days for critical systems.
I'd say at least a year, no? The xz backdoor took a couple months to find, and that was only because we got lucky -- had it never been found, Jia Tan and his buddies probably would have gotten enough useful data after a year, so it'd be irrelevant at that point anyway.
> Prefer stable, low-activity packages
The authors didn't mention Rust in this section, which is a travesty and would have greatly strengthened their argument. Sooo many "abandoned" projects in cargo are just finished and need no maintenance.
> Modern languages like Zig, Gleam, and Roc offer genuine productivity benefits and attract top talent. As a bonus, their ecosystems are young enough that security tooling has not caught up yet. Dependabot will add support eventually, but until then you get the best of both worlds: a modern stack and a quiet PR queue.
How the hell is that actually a good thing? You might as well just use another language and disable Dependabot security updates if that's what you're looking for. Dependabot security updates aren't a liability, they're an asset in a world where developers use hundreds of dependencies daily, where every few months one of them is going to have a XSS or RCE vulnerability that has to be patched ASAP.
> And if you are really concerned about a dependency’s security, you can always rewrite it yourself in Rust over a weekend.
That's not how it works. Honestly, this blog post gets me really worried about this developer's projects and clients.
> If the vulnerability were critical, someone would have merged it by now.
> GitHub Copilot can automatically suggest fixes for security vulnerabilities. Instead of updating to a patched version, let AI generate a workaround in your own code.
Went right over my head LOL it actually made me angry reading it earlier hahaha
Well, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I didn't take it as a joke because I've seen some of these things recommended before (including not checking in lockfiles) in other contexts.
The "> Remove lockfiles from version control" got me as well.
> Reproducible builds sound nice in theory, but velocity matters more than determinism. Think of it as chaos engineering for your dependency tree.
Reproducible builds are nice in practice, too. :) In the Node.js ecosystem, if you have enough dependencies, even obeying semver your dependencies will break your code. Pinning to specific versions is critical.
You wouldn't believe how many of these things I've seen seriously recommended before. Also, I do have difficulty detecting sarcasm sometimes (even though I'm very fond of it).
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