> It makes me wonder why did large companies are investing so much in web and putting web devs to write disk utility desktop apps?
It's because in these environments where corporate cancer has metastasised, programmers are not in charge of hiring programmers, or much of anything when it comes to decision-making really. HR is composed of people who are not programmers. They are looking to hire people with a list of shiny hot new web stack keywords on a resume, because they have literally no other concept of how to filter candidate applications. So they end up with a bunch of hot React devs and nobody capable of making software that is fit for task.
To a non-developer, every application they read might as well be a list of buzzwords. They cannot comprehend a word of it. Web stacks offer the opportunity to list more and newer buzzwords. Do I set up an interview with the person who lists "C systems programmer" or with the person who is a "full stack React, Tailwind, Next.js, Node.js, Electron, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS engineer seasoned in Javascript, Typescript, HTML, and CSS"? Well, the latter certainly sounds 10x more impressive. Into the trashbin the systems programmer application goes, they just don't have enough skills for an enterprise of our scale!
A C systems programmer can definitely make a list of buzzwords as well.
Also, let's say team A (10 C app/systems programmers) in a company asks HR to look for a C developer and HR comes back to them with 10 great web developers to be grilled by the engineers of team A - what happens then? Does team A shrug and say "welcome to our C codebase, we shall now rewrite it in tailwind or whatever because you are now here!" - I really don't see how it can play out
This supposes team A has 10 C programmers in the first place. By one means or another, teams of web developers are put together and made to do non-web-development projects, and now half of the Windows 11 userland is written in fucking React. I'm not the one making these stupid decisions, but probably they were originally hired to work on a web project, then later moved to a new OS-related project because they were the pool of idle employees available, and the fleet of React-in-the-OS programmers expanded as new hires were now being funneled directly into React teams working on OS projects.
Because they lack any better signals from within the company. At several places I have worked, hiring is almost fully detached from the groups that need the workers. They never could find good candidates for our teams. This kind of disconnect is what corporate cancer looks like, and it is endemic in big business.
This quote is completely and totally irrelevant. Nobody is saying they should code a new Outlook. If they did code something, it would be significantly smaller in scope and rigorously tested like spacebound programs in the past were. "New space-engineering-grade code created with actual engineering practices" is absolutely going to be more reliable than "old bloated commercial shitware". But I guess software engineering is a lost art, so it can't be helped.
It's also going to take a hell of a lot longer and cost more than buying an Outlook license. If I was lead on that project, you'd have an uphill battle trying to convince me that spending $100k+ on an email solution unless you can point to specific, serious deficiencies in the existing off the shelf solutions.
Software Engineering is far from a lost art: part of the practice is intelligently making cost-benefit decisions.
The current solution is literally causing problems in space. Space-grade engineering is expensive, but having things go wrong on your already very expensive mission is even more expensive.
Sure, but people who didn't know better until this particular incident do not deserve the title "engineer". Being able to classify and manage risks before they happen is engineering 101.
In reality, GPL is also a cuck license. There is absolutely nothing stopping somebody in India forking your open source game, throwing ads in it, and uploading it to an app store. You cannot prevent people from making money off your free work, and the fact that it is a profitable endeavour for them will lead to them spending money on marketing, "outcompeting" your non-product and providing a strictly worse experience to people who don't know they could get it for free / without ads.
It doesn't even really need to be India, it could just as well be stolen by someone in your country. The vast majority of open source developers don't have the time to invest into copyright protection. Trying to actually enforce your license is signing up for a years-long nightmare of wasting your time, energy, and money dealing with the legal system for, in the end, no real value to yourself. If you release something as open source, you pretty much need to be ready to accept that your license is meaningless when it meets contact with reality.
This is all the more true with LLMs existing now, which are freely used to launder copyright licenses. Maybe in the past GPL would've made Microsoft or Google, at least, think twice about using your code, but now their developers will prompt GPT to reimplement your code.
>. You cannot prevent people from making money off your free work, and the fact that it is a profitable endeavour for them will lead to them spending money on marketing
You can in-fact file a copyright claim against them if they fail to provide the source and attribution.
This is why I prefer the AGPL over the GPL. But isn't this the entire point of open source? So long as it is attributed/following the license, who cares if they're selling it or not?
You can submit a DMCA takedown notice to the app store, and they must take it offline for 14 days and give you the contact details of the perpetrator, or else you can sue the app store for not doing that.
> they must take it offline for 14 days and give you the contact details of the perpetrator
These specific actions are definitely not part of the DMCA. In fact, it's basically the reverse. Unless you hire a lawyer to represent you, you must dox yourself to file a DMCA claim, which will involve handing over your name, address, and phone number to the platform committing the infringement against you, with the DMCA complaint requiring swearing under penalty of perjury that you are not falsifying any details.
> else you can [sue] the app store for not doing that.
This is, I think, the fantasy belief of someone who has never engaged with the legal system. You submit a notice of copyright infringement. They ignore it. Now what? Are you, as an independent developer, prepared to spend years of your life fighting to have it taken offline, out of pure spite, because you aren't going to get anything near the effort you put in? Even if you "win", you still lose, because it's just not worth it.
This is assuming you're even aware of the infringement. It was pure luck that I happened to discover the copyright infringement, in my case. It would be very easy for somebody to never discover that their game was re-labelled with a new name in a foreign app store. And once aware of it, actually trying to enforce my copyright quickly disabused me of the notion that copyright law could ever benefit individuals in any meaningful way.
I agree with your analogy, but as an aside... "Cuck license" is not a phrase that's a term of art outside this blog post and I don't think it's a useful lens for understanding how software licenses work.
It also seems divorced from the practice of intentional cuckoldry. Any "bulls" would know that a more apt analogue would put Amazon and Delve and others as the cucks (expending energy to create arrangements where they can sit back and watch others do the work), and the open source contributors as the 'bulls' or 'cuckqueans' (the ones who actually do the work, but they do it because they find it enjoyable).
Luckily, software licenses aren't really so difficult to understand, and it behooves us to understand them in specifics. So I don't think it serves an illustrative purpose to insist on an analogy where writing software is like being physically intimate with someone elses spouse. I think the author just intends to signal political affiliation through the soft-shibboleth of Being the Type of Guy to Say Cuck A Lot.
You have it backwards. Excellent software becomes popular, and then becomes enshittified later once it already has users. Often there is a monopoly/network effect that allows them to degrade the quality of their software once they already have users, because the value in their offering becomes tied to how many people are using it, so even a technically superior newcomer won't be able to displace it (eg. Youtube is dogshit now but all of the content creators are there, and all of the viewers are there, so content creators won't create content for a better platform with no viewers and viewers won't visit a better platform with no content).
If your goal is to break into the market with software that is dogshit from day 1, you're just going to be ones of millions of people failing their get-rich-quick scheme.
> as victims become perpetrators, it may be best to segregate victims to prevent future abuse and victimization
Wonderful idea. Let's not forget to segregate the poors, since they commit violent crimes at higher rates too. We can build a perfect utopia if only we just get rid of all the undesirables!
Without looking at the codebase, I can already say this is a big ask because it uses the Avalonia framework for cross-platform deployment. .NET Framework 3.5 is Windows-only, and there was a heap of massive breaking changes when the .NET Framework was replaced by the superior .NET Core (now just .NET), so it would be a pretty big maintenance burden to try to maintain a separate build target for that.
Not only do the tools enable incompetent attackers, they also enable a new class of incompetent library developers to create and publish packages, and a new class of incompetent application developers to install packages without even knowing what packages are being used in the code they aren't reading, and a new class of incompetent users who are allowing OpenClaw to run completely arbitrary code on their machines with no oversight. We are seeing only the tip of the iceberg of the security breaches that are to come.
So basically the attacker and the dev who caught it were probably using the same tools if the malware was AI-generated (hence the fork bomb bug), and the investigation was AI-assisted (hence the speed). Less "tip of the iceberg" and more just that both sides got faster.
This is just idiotic to say. Nobody actually prefers to have their data siphoned off, in the abstract. If you make it a choice between "privacy" and "being able to participate in society in any way at all", obviously they're going to pick the latter. That's not a "revealed preference", that's coercion. It doesn't actually have to be that way. We can have a world where we have smartphones, and the government can't use those smartphones to track your location at all times.
Let me know how I can participate in society without a cellphone, credit cards, sharing an ID with businesses, showing my face to ubiquitous cameras, whatever else. I'll do it. Tell me how.
It's a direct violation of the fourth amendment. The worst thing you can do is just accept it, as that normalizes it. This is an end-around to avoid going through judicial channels to obtain information about private citizens, full stop. I'd love to hear about such brazen examples in the past, as right now, we have Kash Patel openly admitting to this activity either out of ignorance or hubris, either of which is terrible.
The majority of the population has been ok with this path for a very long time so it’s unlikely to change.
There are basic ways to act, not just talk, to support resistance to this path. And people, even some people reading this very comment, are unwilling to take those basic actions while also whining loudly and/or downvoting in angst.
There is nothing "basic" about preserving your privacy in this age. I go to ridiculously great lengths to preserve my privacy. That entails using VMs with separate VPNs for every different thing I do on the internet to avoid cross-pollination between my online identities, that entails never taking my smartphone out of the house, that entails using burner phones, that entails accepting that I simply can't use an increasingly large number of services that are being gated by identity verification, which is now trying to be forced on being able to use a computer at all at the OS-level. It is an absolute pain in the ass to worry about this, and it's completely understandable why people give up, but that doesn't mean they actually want it to be this way. Privacy should be the default, not something you have to fight for.
Your tone implies it. "Listen, this is nothing new" is a phrase dripping with "I'm tired of hearing about this". You surely know that the people pointing out continually escalating violations know that the violations are not new.
I read the implication too, as well as the fatigue.
They offered nothing to counteract the idea that we should just shut up and accept it. Then they closed with "And I actually like the concept of reward cards (although I don't use them) because it is pretty much the only way how you can make money off your data." - which sounds like they have given up opposition, and are now considering ways to profit from the situation rather than fight it.
This is a horrendous take. The only thing this is going to do / is already doing is increasing people's creation of their own reality bubble. LLMs are not some source of objective truth, they will inevitability lean towards reinforcing either (1) prompter's position, (2) the model trainer's position, or (3) the statistically average position, none of which are guaranteed to be logically correct. But people do take them as objective truth, so now we have a bunch of fucking morons going around saying "see, ChatGPT says so, I'm right!".
Labelling a test "AGI" does not show AGI progress any more than labelling a cpu "AGI" makes it so. It might show that AI tools are improving but it does not necessarily follow that tools improving = AGI progress if you're on the completely wrong trail.
Any test that humans can pass and AIs cannot is a stepping stone on the way to AGI.
When you run out of such tests then it's evidence that you have reached AGI. The point of these tests is to define AGI objectively as the inability to devise tests that humans have superiority on.
It's because in these environments where corporate cancer has metastasised, programmers are not in charge of hiring programmers, or much of anything when it comes to decision-making really. HR is composed of people who are not programmers. They are looking to hire people with a list of shiny hot new web stack keywords on a resume, because they have literally no other concept of how to filter candidate applications. So they end up with a bunch of hot React devs and nobody capable of making software that is fit for task.
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