JoshuaRogers

https://joshuarogers.net

The advice here is a super red flag. This isn’t what I want to see from my team at all. I’m glad this advice worked for someone but this path could easily set someone up to be seen as unreliable / untrustable.

Even Wikipedia feels like each page has a prominent “Plea from Jimmy Wales” ad at the top of every page (even after donating), even if it isn’t billed as such.

They also won’t reimburse said employee for the lawyer they needed to hire or the lost revenue from being in court and not at work.

Even if vindicated, the process can be costly.

I felt like that was implied by the usage of AGPL: if Amazon wanted to start using this and apply patches on top of it, the AGPL would require that they share those patches with their customers, which would allow Elastic to integrate them into main again.

At my company, we do business in the EU. It's a wide market with many opportunities. We're extremely careful with personal data: we do not intentionally collect user data, we do not share data with any third-party (and certainly never sell it)!

Importantly though, the law does not suffice with "careful". We *think* we have our bases covered and are careful to try to ensure they are but we're not sure how to *know* our bases are covered. There's the fear that some logs that we believe are anonymous might be considered identifying by some data scientist armed with techniques we've never heard of. There's the concern that some third-party library might dynamically pull in a font-set that comes from a US-based CDN based on some user configuration that we don't foresee. There's the anxiety of asking "Did we forget something? Is the DNS server in us-east-1?" when trying to roll out new features.

These are all strawmen, but they represent the kind of anxiety we feel. Having done our best to respect the requirements and the spirit in which they were written, there's the fear that we were imperfect in our awareness and that that something could cost us a fine that would have gone to someone's salary.

I would very much condemn the indiscriminate collecting, reuse, and selling of personal data, but I would also caution that those of us wanting to play by the rules find them lacking in precision.

If anyone from JetBrains is reading this thread, please take the above to heart. I have yet to have any devs in my circle make the comment that "the JetBrains AI assistant really saved me time" but I've heard more than once about how distracting (and generally incorrect) its guesses are.

I'd really rather have time invested in making the memory footprint smaller again.

At some point Sweeney presumably enabled Find My, had his laptop stolen, never removed the laptop from Find My and then is upset that his laptop still reports in its location as he configured it to do and never remotely disabled?

That’s a bold opinion he has there.

You might consider 1Password. They don’t have the key so they effectively only see an all of the data in encrypted form, not even revealing the site, if I recall.

They have some fascinating papers about it, if I recall.

I always knew my dad was a good dad but only once I had a kid did I really understand how much he had quietly and willing given up because he loved me. More and more each day I understand him better and continue gaining an appreciation for all that he has done for me. All of this thanks to my daughter making me / giving me the chance to see life from the other side.

I think what they were saying, especially given the phrasing “How many projects luckily succeeded after a reckless decision?” is that, if things hadn’t failed we would never have known and thus how many other failures of procedure/ ethics have we just not seen because the worst case failed to occur.

As long as you also choose the Moon Pie of UIs to go with it, you’ll be fine.

This might be a bit disingenuous. Another slightly less insulting yet equally valid interpretation is that design as a whole has shifted over the last decade plus to value form over function. The current unbridled minimalist aesthetic has a futuristic look attracts companies that want to look futuristic (Apple, Tesla, Microsoft…)

And for companies that aren’t leaders? Many of them want to be seen as such anyway, or at least not seen as irrelevant. (We might remember how X started popping up in all manner of names when XP came out.)

To some degree there is room for this as long as function remains a primary goal, however we might reasonably argue that the current competition in technology is to look sleek, not to actually empower end users, leading to a design language that’s main purpose is to look nice but not be ultimately useful.

I understand what you're saying, but as someone who spends most of the undirected Lego time with my daughter struggling to figure out what to build, I'm going to suggest that you have fallen into the trap of assuming that the way you do things is "correct" and not simply "the way I do things."

Extending this further, the belief that a competitor has an effective drug gaining traction in the market while you are still at an unpromising point in research could reasonably lead companies to focus their research elsewhere. After all, your costs don’t go down for research if a competitor is already delivering, but your likely returns do drop.

Honestly, I laughed when I saw your username and the comment together.

Absolutely. I’m surprised that the belief in much of the comments is that the technical input of developers (like myself) affects whether Oracle gets consideration.

Oracle gets consideration because teams want to have a lifeline if something goes wrong or (worst case) someone else to pin the blame on when it does. And this happens because some businesses are actually so big that that level of comfort doesn’t even dent the budget.

Oracle actually has some nice parts and some rough edges (a statement that applies equally to PG and SQL Server too, for instance), but it comes with a king-sized security blanket.

Sure, it's not arbitrary code execution, but it's certainly privilege escalation.

This does a bunch of Very Important Things that I don’t understand very well, including calling main. So I won’t explain them.

Honestly, this line was the best in the whole article. It felt like at that moment I knew the person talking to me wasn't trying to prove that they were some sage (personally guilty here) but instead of was someone who wanted to show me something cool that we could both enjoy.

Wonderful write up.

That might be misunderstanding the role of copyright as it applies to the worlds we live in.

Many here see copyright as a critical tool necessary for the existence of copy-left licenses, licenses that we use to make sure that what we write stays open in a way that others can benefit from.

We rely on copyright to ensure that our code stays “Free as in speech” not simply “Free as in beer”. Simply accepting no form of creator control is at odds with our desire to make sure that the things we produce stay open for others to use since there is nearly no incentive for the next person to keep our code open.

Or both: when downloading music, both the one downloading and the one uploading can see legal action.

While they might not charge you directly as a line item, you still get charged: Linode in the above list is what I use. I get a fixed cap of bandwidth each month. Anything beyond that is charged. So, you don't get charged IF you stay below the initial cap.

Honestly, the first thing I'd do is hope that they forgot that I make house and car payments though them and that they forgot how much damage they could do to my professional life just by intentionally sabotaging my credit. Crypto doesn't provide any realistic protection to me from their whims should they become bad actors.

That’s a fair point. Maybe a more true statement would have been that any perception of Tesla having a technical advantage over other manufacturers towards Level 5 autonomous vehicles is just smoke and mirrors.

I wouldn't expect so. My (non-professional) understanding was that having historical status raised the amount of upkeep and approval required for modifications.

Based on my reading of their post where they announced it was free…

We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on subscriptions again.

… and based on my reading of their jobs page …

*How will Beeper make money?* We charge our users a $10/monthly paid subscription service. Our pricing model allows Beeper to deliver a great product and service, while eliminating any need to profit by monetizing user data.

… and the affirmation of that on their homepage …

Our business model is simple - we build a great app and earn money from those who find value in it.

… I’m not sure where the narrative that their goal was anything other than to make money is coming from. They’re a business with a potentially useful product and full-time salaried employees.

In this case I wasn’t arguing in their favor but arguing that the lack of agreement to a TOS does not somehow imply authorization.

Your argument encompasses the whole of User-Agent filtering, no?

Edit: grammar.

If we’re presuming that the end-user has not agreed to any term of service, then why are we assuming that they have the right to use the service in anyway whatsoever? It’s basically the definition of unauthorized use at that point.

I would suggest that as often as not, when the EU intervenes in technological affairs the result isn’t that things get massively better but rather that people are forced to deal with corporations finding ways to maliciously comply with the letter of the law.