Yeah I think a few things are going to bite some people in the ass. Odoo, for example, is "open source" until you need "enterprise" things. Well, it turns out you can point a robot at it and just add those things on your own now. Bonus for releasing your fork under the same license as the community edition... Strange times.
Yeah, my consultancy had used Harvest for over a decade. It just worked; it did what we needed, and I didn't think twice about the $1500/yr or so bill... Until this year when they dumped us over into "enterprise" and charged my business card TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. I found that charge two days after it posted when I went in to remove a seat for a contractor who had moved on. I absolutely lost my shit. I couldn't get ahold of anyone at harvest at all, and wound up executing a charge back. Finally someone reached out via email with a "deal" charging us "only" $5000/yr (for literally the same service we had used prior). I get an increase of maybe even 10% but this was pure nonsense. Ultimately harvest refunded us and the chargeback was reversed, which came with its own set of problems.
In response we have moved every SaaS we still use over to monthly billing. For time tracking, we're now using an internal vibe coded app, and it does exactly everything I need it to do. These fools really screwed themselves, IMO. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who would have just kept paying for and using the software indefinitely.
That seems reasonable.. "secure through age" is effectively "security through obscurity", which is stunningly effective most of the time... yet, I'll take a hard pass. I will let it rest in peace. Note that your point is well taken. I have an arbitrarily large collection of legacy compute that I have acquired over the years, and it all stays offline because I don't have the time or energy to deal with any fallout of plugging it in. I'm sure everything would be fine. The NeXT box, the old BBS servers, the CP/M crap I can never find time to dork around with.. maybe one day if I am able to retire I'll spin up the inefficient hoard and enjoy it. But until then, I can't risk the distraction. I miss when it was a hobby and not a career.
I have a working NeXT workstation with a monochrome monitor and working system keyboard and mouse. Running the original NeXTSTEP os. It's not a cube, just a workstation, but I'm happy to have it. I dumpster dove the workstation sometime around 1997, and my HS girlfriend's dad donated the KVM to me when he learned I obtained a workstation. He kept the cubes for himself; three previously employed at his now defunct typesetting company.
I have it displayed on the stairs to the basement of my software consulting firm. I nod at it every time I walk by.. and then ponder the chaos that would ensue if I plugged it into the internet.
I'm not Jobs' biggest fan, but we stand on the shoulders of giants.
I definitely enjoy learning other people's opinions on things I didn't realize I had an opinion on until I learned there was something to opine about.
To me the arbitrarily complex docker networking makes perfect sense. Especially in a compose setup. I want my containers to be able to talk to each other, but I don't want them on my local network or even accessible (sometimes) from the local machine. The various internal networks offer isolation of containers from the rest of the network stack. If I have a rails app in a docker compose configuration with PG, Redis, Elasticsearch, etc, in a development environment, most of the time I don't want the service/accessory containers anywhere near anything other than the app's container. And if I want several compose stacks to work together, I just put them on the same named network. I apologize if I misunderstood your point.
I don't actually know what you're referring to, but from context I can guess that you're referring to something like the Juno dialup "at&t" links they used to actually send the emails. The PPP L/P were stored in the .ini files and they were great free PPP links while they lasted.
I grew up running and calling dialup BBSs, learning to program in the MS DOS shell world with QBasic and Turbo Pascal "IDE"s, dialing up and later telnetting into a Lynx browser (early on when I couldn't afford a PPP link with lawn mowing money).. the "terminal" and thereby TUI applications (they weren't called that at the time as far as I know, but that's definitely what they were) are home, for at least me. I just wish more TUIs had single keystroke hotkeys (indicated by the hotkey's letter in the menu item title being a different color or intensity) like the old BBS and other menus. I could login and download a QWK packet quicker than the time it took for the modem to finish the DTMF tones. I'm excited about how many new things allow me to stay in the interface my brain formed around. YMMV
I immediately thought of the painter analogy (from the books which are astonishingly good) of "painting" 3D objects into 2D objects from the stories, and wondered if the author was exploring the reverse of this "perfect painting" that is still "functional". I'm definitely a lay person, I know enough physics to use a lever to lift heavy things.
I can't properly read the tank/car comment, the comparison is bizarre to me. But I think this misses the point a bit. The reality of these new risks is literally being learned in front of us in real time, and in my opinion, anyone who claims to understand these risks is speculating at best, and actively manipulating the situation for whatever reasons.
While I am a (mostly) capitalist and generally disagree with nationalization (including, for the time being, this situation), I also don't think we can say that "centralized power never works". Maybe we scope that a bit. I know plenty of business owners who centralize power in their businesses and they are effective, ethical and it works perfectly fine. In theory, in the US, nationalizing some unit of the economy _decentralizes_ power; the US is, after all, a representative democracy. Trustworthiness of the electorate is a different problem. But I don't think we can generalize much about centralization beyond sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. There is a difference between centralizing all power in a given administrative unit, and centralizing certain powers, but that's more analogous to non-democratic units.
Yes, agreed. Except "involve a judge or jury" is where the wildcard comes in. I believe there will be reasons to doubt culpability as we move further into the nonsense. Justified or not. My point is really just that we're in some weird territory, so I guess I'm going to make popcorn and watch. Some deeper legal questions lurk in this mess, and I don't think the obvious answers will always necessarily be right.
It seems that simple, I agree, but digging in we're winding up in a bit of a "responsible party" black hole, at least it seems from my non-legal engineer perspective. If I ask an AI to find me articles on some arbitrary things and it hacks the Gibson to do it; and I am not a computer expert, it will be a struggle a bit to honestly put the blame on me. It's always been that way I think.. in what reasonable world can a non-lawyer agree to 100+ pages of a ToS and actually understand it? No world. But that's the point I think. What if I modify every TOS in HTML before I submit it and then agree by checking the box under my "redlined" version of the contract? I think this stuff is going to become exponentially murkier as time goes on.
I've been yelling at the top of my lungs since I was a kid and the clipper chip was floated. I even had a commentary published in FidoNews about it, though I was like 15 and it was fairly incoherent. I don't know that anyone really is listening to me, but I'm with you. I tell myself that every time I spend 5 minutes haranguing to someone about the dangers of "trusted computing" (for lack of a better term) I haven't yet harangued to might buy us all one more voice in this obnoxious ceaseless war.
Right, but how does that sentiment get encoded in such a way that AI models can exhibit such things as "morals" or "ethics" in alignment? Murder is a bit of an extreme case. For example, countless people break traffic laws all of the time, so neither their internal "ethics" nor the law prove to be a reliable control. I can't get on the highway without driving the speed limit and being passed by almost everyone else on the road; and that behavior is arbitrarily more dangerous than following the speed limit and statistically more likely cause someone to be killed than following posted speed limits. I guess my point is that this is a very complex topic and I'm not smart enough to have any answers.
I agree with this assessment. My consulting business partner and I are in the process of moving a bunch of applications from an old deployment managed with Ansible on EC2 over to an ECS deployment. We're doing this app by app, and it's taking a while. The last two apps we both moved we were able to point the model at the appropriate repository and aws account and it was able to execute the entire move on both of these _in one shot_ with various CLI tools. That's not a parlor trick.
After a re-read, I realized the claim wasn't "single purpose", it was "primary purpose", in which case this makes even more sense to me. I guess everything else comes from understanding what's in a given PR. It is difficult to find bugs in code that you don't understand, and it's difficult to understand code that doesn't follow convention, etc. I think I've worked this way and just not thought about it from this perspective. I review a lot of code, and what I generally do is fire up my editor in the relevant repo and follow along. If there's a method call to outside of the PR, depending on what it is and what I know about it, I'll pull that up in my editor and review there to make sure I understand what's happening. That understanding is where the comments come from. Maybe "I understand this and it's right" or "I understand this, and it seems wrong because [something]" or "I do not understand this because [whatever]" etc. Maybe "primary purpose" isn't perfect.. perhaps "overarching goal" or similar.. :shipit:
I agree with all of this, I read into the "single purpose" of understanding the code and complaining about what you don't understand implying that if you understand it, you will be able to point out and comment on things that are wrong /foolish/unsafe/etc after understanding it. From that perspective on the OP, it makes sense to me. Particularly with regard to modularity and factoring; once I understand all of a gigantic PR I will have modeled it in my mind and will begin to either see that it will be maintainable, or will be a total nightmare one day... or somewhere in between.
Thanks for pulling that thread with me. It would be interesting to see if the lower bound on information needed is ever swappable with the upper bound on the speed of information transfer.
I appreciate this narrative; relatable to me in how I have experienced and watched others around me experience the last few years. It's as if we're all kinda-sorta following a similar "Dunning–Kruger effect" curve at the same time. It feels similar to growing up mucking around with a ppp connection and Netscape in some regards. I'll stretch it: "multimodal", meet your distant analog "hypermedia".
I'm pretty far away from learning about these things in school, but this made me wonder on the connection between the mentioned communication complexity lower bound and special relativity limits on how fast information can travel.
This sentiment has been rolling around in my head for a while. I assume one day I'll be using some hosted model to solve a problem, and suddenly I won't be able to get anything out beyond "it would actually work a lot better if you redeployed your application on Azure infra with a bunch of licensed Windows server instances. Here's 15 paragraphs about why.."
I think you missed a critical step: 1.5: know that "allowed tools" is the correct incantation required to summon the relevant documentation; which, at least to me, is not obvious at all in the context of the OP.
I definitely agree with the spirit of this, but I also know a lot of non technical people who aren't as paranoid about things like this as I am (we have a keypad lock, backup keys in mounted lockboxes along with a 9v battery to power the keypad if need be), and they just expect that paying for something fairly critical like a door lock means it will either work normally, or give an indication that stuff might go sideways soon ("low battery! Replace or be locked out", for example).
I suspect stories like "I left my house without my keys on the day they shut it down to go for a walk and couldn't get back into my home." Or "I somehow locked my keys in my car, including the backup house key. Luckily my backup car key is in the house." Only to realize the lock isn't working normally and there are 100 emails warning them about this in their "updates" tab.. buried under a mountain of spam.
There will definitely be people who wind up stuck with this, especially with such short notice, and it won't necessarily be because they didn't plan. Now I'm going to go double check my lockbox.
While I agree with your sentiment, there's a pretty good chance that at least some of this is, for example, data that inadvertently leaked while someone accidentally exposed an automatic index with Apache, or perhaps an asset manifest exposed a bunch of uploaded images in a folder or bucket that wasn't marked private for whatever reason. I can think of a lot of reasons this data could be "public" that would be well beyond the control of the person exposed. I also don't think that there's a universal enough understanding that uploading something to your WordPress or whatever personal/business site to share with a specific person, with an obscure unpublished URL is actually public. I think these lines are pretty blurry.
Edit: to clarify, in the first two examples I'm referring to web applications that the exposed person uses but does not control.
When I first began experimenting with Linux my first frustration was that it "didn't support" cd.. my mind was blown when I mentioned it to a friend who promptly demonstrated that the use of a space between "cd" and ".." worked in both environments. I decided I should RTFM after that.
A tiny bit of thought about your situation IMO should lead anyone to conclude that you just first-hand experienced the fallout of today's nightmare, and then took a step back and realized you were likely one of millions if not billions of other people experiencing the same, and relayed that thought in terms of immediately understandable loss. Someone else might see "wrong" but I saw empathy.