jrm4

Great, good riddance. Hopefully open source and/or AI push this person out of developing entirely.

People who focus this much on "conversion" et al are dinosaurs who deserve extinction.

It's technically odd and illogical, but practically probably correct and on-the-money, as the companies try to artificially create demand?

Anyone else entirely unimpressed? I'm just thinking about all the sensor and responsive things that must exist for cars, planes, manufacturing etc, and this just seems like an inevitable trick that someone could do?

Like, my kid watches the Mark Rober videos and this is just that?

I'm sorry, what is this "high trust" society of which you speak?

Reductio ad absurdum big time.

But let's see if I can explain it in a capitalism friendly way, I guess.

I have a preference for cashiers checking my stuff out for me, so that's how I select. Partly because I like the convenience, partly because I like knowing more people are having jobs.

And here's the important part; I personally actually have significant control over this, which makes it different from your silly argument.

And where do you account for the absolutely countable number of lost jobs in this equation?

"Everyone does it every day"

That makes it okay?

"It is not considered wrong"

By WHOM? I go out of my way to avoid self-checkout when I can, because I consider it 'wrong.'

I like how "soft to hard" makes sense as a gradient, which is often the flaw in new "periodic tables," but, for anyone who might know, does Cow to Reindeer make any sense here as a gradient? I'm guessing not?

This comment exemplifies my worst fear and reinforces my somewhat incomplete idea that IPv4 is perhaps overall safer for the world, and that "worse is better" depending on what you're optimizing for.

Roughly, it's my belief that an IPv6 world makes it easier for centralizing forces and harder for local p2p or p2p-esque ones; e.g. an IPv6 world would have likely made it easier to do bad things like "charge for individual internet user in a home."

The decentralization of "routing power" is more a good thing than bad, what you pay for in complexity you get back in "power to the people."

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My gut is -- of course these concerns are valid, but, especially with "newfangled" software projects like this, I'd genuinely be surprised to see major quality differences between "human" and "vibe-coded."

I think what I mean by "newfangled" is; this isn't a low-level C memory managed bit flipping thing; this is the sort of thing that's already built on top of layer of layer of the cruft that the web already is, for better or worse.

For the record, I think it's important to highlight this as "hey, the system actually works" sometimes. All the fatalism and whatnot with government.

Linus Torvalds. Richard Stallman. GNU and the GPL.

As a bit of an old-timer, I literally don't know exactly where to start a new conversation on this in a place like this; for me the obviousness of the theoretical and practical superiority of free and open source software principles are just always there for me; and it's quite obvious here that it's different for younger people.

So I'm dropping the names and the concepts. Perhaps someone else knows how to get this going?

It shouldn't make you sad, it should make you curious.

Broadly, I've observed that there's way way way too little discussion of the extent to which money and power, somewhat behind the scenes, can be thrown at what feels like "tech decisions."

A while back, here in Florida, a state representative had a relative who was kind of into open source and had it explained to him. Representative was like "oh interesting idea, Florida should look into doing more of this"

And the suits from Microsoft came down swiftly to "correct" matters.

My big picture take here; this is precisely why bitcoin itself could perhaps go to zero, and yet other cryptocurrencies could survive, aka the so-called "flippening."

It may come to pass that "proof-of-work" was merely a good proof of concept to launch the idea; but proof-of-stake is (of course) better.

I mean, as I've somewhat said above, I do donate to Mozilla for a direct-but-big reason. Overall, I find their work VERY important. I acknowledge that they've never been perfect, but I've watched what they've done for 20-30 years and strongly trust that generally, they're doing good things with my money because that's what they've been doing.

Thunderbird, separate from Mozilla, I don't think has that to rely on. That does feel more like "why should I give money to this project that (for me) has been pretty mid at maintaining a popular piece of software?"

"If you get value from Thunderbird"

I'm reading this and I'm feeling like, maaan, I wish you hadn't asked me that.

So, compare to Mozilla (which apparently they're not with anymore?) I actively use Firefox and probably more importantly, I remain very impressed with their ability to try to keep up with the times. They do fail at this sometimes, but over 20-30 years, that track record is solid.

Thunderbird? Ugh. I want it to be good, but I'm not so sure there's much of a point here anymore. My line in the sand was different colored multiple accounts which was trivially easy and then one day wasn't; moreover AI is really killing them there for me (in terms of taking something old like Claws or Neomutt and very easily customizing it a way that was too much of a pain before)

Ooh, I like this argument a lot. Right now I'm thinking a good analogy is, you live in a gated community, but the locks on your house and your ring camera are fine -- but your overly annoying gate system makes it hard for people or deliveries to get to you etc.

No. The existence of actually dangerous bootkits in relation to ease of use of UEFI, ease of prevention, likelihood and magnitude of harm of said bootkits and adverse secondary problems when UEFI is used.

Sure. Now, of the people who buy houses -- how many of them would find this a difficult or onerous task?

And then, do computers.

Apples and oranges here, for this point.

It is absolutely not.

It's a decent one for "locks on an apartment building that someone else owns."

But no, purchasing a house ought not include by default "a set of locks that you must work around, permission-wise."

Secure Boot provides no useful security for an individual user on the machine they own, and as such should be disabled by default.

If you want to enable it for enterprise/business situations, thats fine, but one should be clear about that. Otherwise you get the exact Microsoft situation you mentioned and also no one knows about it.

I love this point, but also it seems to me that "not understanding the difference between a skyscraper and a shed" is perhaps the biggest barrier to thinking and talking about software development in general.

Like, "is vibecoding good or bad?"

Depends! Probably fine for a shed and terrible for a skyscraper. Or maybe there are some things within the skyscraper that might be vibecodable? I don't know.

Courage with consequences, yes.

It buried the more important point, one tech hasn't learned yet.

Taste may be kind of important because it helps toward the truly important thing, which is skin-in-the-game.

But also, with the right skin-in-the-game, you don't even need "taste." You just need real life consequences, which we don't do enough in tech.

Yup, pretty sure there are no licenses that say "you must upstream," just "if you upstream, do it openly."

This definitely reminds me of a lot of Nassim Taleb's work, which to say -- Anthropic may not be behaving intelligently but they are at least somewhat behaving honorably, -- if you're going to put out a dangerous product, a moral minimum is to use it heavily yourself so as to be exposed to the risk it creates.

Ha, I've literally never heard of bottom, and haven't looked it up yet, but it's just kind of funny doing Linux/Unix forever and knowing almost exactly what it must be about, just given the name. I'll edit this if I was wrong, but I bet I won't be.