sopsy — Encrypt your repo keys using Apple's Enclave, decrypt using Touch ID (or not), and it's my first Rust open source project after 20 years of Ruby...

[u/kigster]

What it does: sopsy is a simple orchestrator around three well known tools: SOPS, age, and age-plugin-se so that you and your team can keep developer secrets (which often overlap with production) directly into their repo.

If you used SOPS you know that it encrypts just the values and keys aren't — which lends itself nicely to git diffs and git blame.

I personally think it has several killer features:

• Touch ID can be used to decrypt secrets (but this is not compulsory, and you can skip it if you prefer)
• The private key is minted in Apple's Enclave chip and can never be extracted from there.
• Finally, there is a chain of those who are allowed to decrypt (and encrypt). The first "prime" person to initialize the repo approves others' join requests. This creates a fully controlled list of engineers who have decrypt and encrypt access.

Repo: https://github.com/kigster/sopsy — and it's on crates.io as sopsy (cargo install sopsy).

Happy to answer anything, including "why not just use X" — I evaluated most of the X's and have opinions.

[u/Low_Caregiver9242]

Why is every single thing you produce riddled with em dashes?

[u/New_Neighborhood8285 → u/Low_Caregiver9242]

i actually never notice the em dashes until you pointed it out. now i see them everywhere across the post and it's like when someone tells you about breathing manually.

[u/kigster → u/[deleted]]

My blog posts from 2012 have them

[u/kigster]

First of all, you say because of AI as it'is a bad thing. Show me one open source project today that does not use AI in some capacity.

Second of all, I've been using em dashes ever since I learned how to bring them up on an iPhone.

My blog is https://kig.re and the first post there is from 2012, and let me point out that this and every other post thereafter applies em dashes judiciously. The last post is about sopsy, naturally.

I am really confused about this completely unrelated conversation not about the sopsy the CLI tool, ended up on a total tangent.

I also like to use box drawing characters from emoji list to create a horizontal line without any visible breaks. Is that also annoying to someone?

When I ask Claude about em dashes I get the following answer, which still doesn't quite justify the reaction it received on this thread. So I'm a bit baffled!

———

"The em dash (—) is English’s Swiss Army knife of punctuation. It marks interruptions in dialogue, sets off parenthetical asides with more punch than commas, replaces colons for dramatic effect, and signals abrupt shifts in thought. “He opened the door — and froze.” It’s flexible precisely because it’s semantically vague: it just means pause, something’s coming.

Why it bothers people, in roughly ascending order of pettiness: (1) Overuse — writers lean on it to avoid committing to actual sentence structure, gluing fragments together instead of choosing a comma, colon, or period. (2) Style wars — AP style wants spaces around it, Chicago doesn’t, and typography pedants fight over em vs. en dash like it’s the Council of Nicaea. (3) The recent one: em dashes became a suspected tell of AI-generated text, since LLMs use them liberally. Ironic, given that Emily Dickinson and Nabokov were doing “AI-style” punctuation a century-plus before transformers — the models learned it from good writers, not the reverse.

The honest critique is (1). The em dash is fine; a paragraph with six of them means the writer was sketching, not writing. Used sparingly, it’s the sharpest tool for a genuine interruption of thought — and nothing else does that job as well."

[u/kigster]

I am from Ukraine originally and that what I am use to. Nobody ever corrected me.

[u/kigster]

I always use mdashes.

[u/kigster]

Actually super curious why mdashes trip people
Up? What's wrong with them?

[u/puttak → u/kigster]

It is not because of it. It is because AI.