In all honesty, the constant rambling against any service provider when something goes wrong is tiring. as. fuck.

“I’m not using anything, I’m self-hosting everything and no cloudflare can take ME down!” - hot stuff buddy, let’s talk again when at some point you’ll have something interesting and get hugged to death. Or when something of your diy self hosted stack breaks or gets taken down by an attack.

“I’m not using (big company name) but (small startup name), and I’m not having any issues!” - wow, great, obviously the goal of the company is to stay as small as they are and supply your service. Let’s talk again too, when at some point your friendly startup gets sold, or grows more. Oh btw, smaller company usually also means less resources.

“That’s all because they are using centralized services, we need to federate everything to not have a single point of failure” - federation alone won’t help if the centralized service has several magnitudes of resources more. Any single cloudflare exit node can probably handle several times the load of the fediverse. We’ve seen lemmy instances go down all the same, and this will happen with any infrastructure.

I’m not supporting big companies having that much market share and the amount of control over the Internet as a whole that they have. But, have at least some respect from a technical standpoint for the things they’ve built. I’d say way over 80% here haven’t seen infrastructure, traffic and software on a scale that’s even remotely close to the big players, but are waffling about how this or that is better and how those problems should be solved and handled. Sit the fuck down.

Honestly, cleaning up legacy shit code is already a thing, it’s called consulting.

It won’t be a dedicated career field. The AI bubble is at an all time high, and it works now. What people will realize, is that there is more to a piece of software than just the initial code / prototype. AI is amazing at prototyping, it’s fast and it gives the dopamine rush of bringing something online fast. What AI is not good at is actually creating production ready code. Maintainability, security, operations of AI slop code suck. Massively. Adding features by AI to a vibe coded codebase sucks, and all of this is amplified exponentially if the person vibe coding does not know their shit.

The question on vibe coding is not if it will break, but when. And when it breaks, it does not matter if it’s AI or just bad code. It’s a broken app that needs fixing, and that’s just your regular software engineering job.

No matter how well reasoned, allegedly fit for purpose or how much something pretends to be it, we shouldn’t be trusting those promises, especially not from people we don’t know. That does not end well neither for the free candy van nor for cybersecurity. Trust like that has been responsible for a lot of attacks over varying vectors and for projects going wrong.

On the other hand, detrimental reliance is a tort and if someone is relying on an app for a specific safety function, the app could be civilly liable if it fails it’s function in some way.

Yes, if the app would be any kind of official tool.

Imagine if you had this attitude about an insulin use tracker/calculator, that sometimes gave wildly wrong insulin dose numbers.

Yes, and that’s why regulations for those kinds of things exist, that prevent those things. There is no regulation for the ice tracker.

Maybe down the road, it’s decided that aiding and abetting ICE is a crime, and providing misinformation intentionally or unintentionally is a criminal act. App developer dude could be criminally liable if he knew or ought to have known he had vulnerabilities. You know, in your New Nuremberg trials that you are going to get sometime in the next decade or so.

If down the road a regulation would happen for, app developer dude would be forced to either comply or to stop operations.

So fucking what? He is not being paid in any kind, and anything he does on that project is volunteer work. If he was not able to do anything on that project due to regular work, vacation, personal issues, or the simple fact that he didn’t want to?

If you don’t pay for a service, you don’t get to decide what people do, deal with it

Honestly, apart from the report being potentially wrong, the researcher seems pretty entitled as well. Like good intentions and all that, but he’s given him a week to fix the issue, usual practice in responsible disclosure are 90 days. We’re not talking about a company here, it’s some single random dude providing the app.

This really sounds like some personal issue written down for public drama, while making himself ridiculous for not knowing his own shit properly.

Unless there are those who need certain words for their jobs, I can kinda understand why Microsoft wouldn’t want emails from work addresses to go out with political agendas… for either side.

Sure. Then block both sides, and not only the one not bringing you money.

Work emails should just be about work. Too many people use their work emails like a personal email… with their banking, shopping, etc. That’s what personal email addresses are for.

No one uses their company email for their personal banking, simply for the reason because if you’d leave, you’d lose your access, and since most companies run behind firewalls, vpns, 2fa tokens and similar additional credentials, it’s simply harder to use.

This policy should go for many non-work related topics too. IT can unblock the words for certain users who need to use them for their job.

Of course, let’s waste resources to maintain idiotic blocklists that are out of date the moment they are rolled out, and additional resources to make the blocklist actually work. Palestine, p4lestine, pale s tine, p a l e s t i n e, paleztine. Need more?

You’re not at work for someone with this kind of unhinged mentality watching you working for 8 hours a day straight with no breaks and no distractions. You’re there to get your work done. In my current team, we’ve had the best ideas talking about our problems at the coffee machine. I personally focus best when I have music on. We’re doing sports together once a week on a company fitness incentive, which boosted our team dynamic massively. None of this would be possible in such a controlled environment.

Take the following with a grain of salt, it depends on your specific setup, environment and preference, but might help you:

Regarding system backups, and depending whether you need to run fedora, check out nixos, which takes a declarative file and builds your system based on that. Declarative immutable system, no moving parts, no breakage. If your system breaks, revert to a prior version and keep using what you’ve had before before retrying. Your backup is a git repo or whatever is keeping your handful of config files. Has been an absolute game changer for me, and the community and ecosystem around it is far beyond the point of quirky esoteric immutable distro.

VSCode has a powerful feature that I’ve yet to see in another editor/IDE - remote development, and it works really, really well. Spin up a VM however you like (I’d recommend checking out Vagrant), and depending on how much you need to do in windows either use the windows box as a remote run target (just running your built artifact in windows), or as a remote development box (running everything in windows and using your Linux VSCode as a “Frontend” for everything else happening in windows). Both methods can be made to work seamlessly in vsc.

Excel - again depending on your usage, you can try wine, you can use a VM, dual boot, M365 in browser, or a remote VM.

You probably just should let an AI generate that.

It’s not about being dumb and expecting stuff for free but a general anger towards subscription based models. Fair models exist and are possible, but are a collateral of the general hate.

Then, free alternatives exist, and believe it or not, some people do not have a tiny monthly fee they could spare or do not want to pay for something that a free alternative exists.

Threema tried exactly that, and failed comically.

So, you mean using a proprietary vendor to operate something binds you to that vendor? Congratulations, you’ve just discovered vendor lock-in.

“Obfuscating the environment” is also an absolutely unhinged claim, what even is that supposed to mean?

And again, Automattic is NOT in the right. What Automattic did was break license terms, attempt to extort, steal code, and light their whole brand, company, ecosystem and community on fire. Matt spit in the faces of his open source community (and open source in general), and every single person dependent on WordPress losing their job because of the shift he’s causing will be blood on his hands personally. Even if WP Engine was questionably morally or ethically, they did play by the laws and the license terms. Matt went on a mental breakdown and additionally to his unethical behavior broke several laws on that journey, which is exactly why he is losing the lawsuit. Matt and Automattic are NOT in the right.

To be fair, Matt is providing meltdowns regularly and totally free of charge. 😂

I’d laugh my ass off if WP Engine would lead a hard fork called WP Core. If any WP Engine folks read this, feel free to use the name, I won’t sue, I promise.

It really depends what you’re doing. If it’s really “only” blogging I’ve seen a lot of blogs using Ghost. Hugo is more of a “simpler” static site generator.

That whole blog post is so full of salt, that it really hurts to read.

Still going on about the “imbalance of the contributions”, well that’s open source for you - you don’t get to control who contributes how much, all you can do is ask nicely, and provide a good experience for contributors. Acting like a lunatic does not do that.

legal attacks started by WP Engine

Of course they did after the witch-hunt and the absolutely illegal, unethical and plain ridiculous behavior of Automattic. The counter they did, the whole ACF takeover and the slandering are a lawsuit handed on a plate.

The way “community” is quoted in that article for those who dared to disagree.

This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health.

Yeah, as a developer I also hate when lawsuits are stopping me from working. He had no problem letting go of nearly 10% of his staff with their “alignment offer” to get rid of people who again dared to disagree, but the legal action is diverting resources now.

But the whole “Focused on the Future” paragraph is going full mask off:

Before, they said that resources will be reallocated to “for-profit projects within Automattic”, and

We will redirect our energy toward projects that can fortify WordPress for the long term

It’s only a matter of time another hostile takeover will take place, and Matt will attempt to go full for-profit on WordPress itself.

We’re excited to return to active contributions to WordPress core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org when the legal attacks have stopped.

Full on extortion. Stop the lawsuit or we won’t contribute.

Honestly, if I’d be dependent on WordPress for my work, I’d not sleep well and start going into something else right fucking now. How are people that stupid, childish and entitled getting into such positions.

Matt never ceases to amaze with his smoothbrain decisions.

The amount of effort this moron puts into his weird personal vendetta against WP engine, even after the court told him that he has nothing, which was actually his last chance to end this kinda gracefully, could’ve been used for so much better things.

And he’s not only successfully kicking himself in the balls, he’s willing to throw so many years of community and project time and effort under the bus for it.

Go on Matt, keep telling how much you’re only doing this for WordPress.

Isn’t Ubuntu Pro basically just an extended support for a set of universe packages for their LTS versions and free for private use?

How is making enterprises pay for extended LTS because of corporate no-update-just-insert-coin mentalities even remotely close to ransomware?

Like I get everyone who doesn’t like Ubuntu for various reasons, but this sounds completely dumb to me.

The smallest footprint for an actual scripting probably will be posix sh - since you already have it ready.

A slightly bigger footprint would be Python or Lua.

If you can drop your requirement for actual scripting and are willing to add a compile step, Go and it’s ecosystem is pretty dang powerful and it’s really easy to learn for small automation tasks.

Personally, with the requirement of not adding too much space for runtimes, I’d write it in go. You don’t need a runtime, you can compile it to a really small zero dependency lib and you have clean and readable code that you can extend, test and maintain easily.

haven’t actually proven to be effective at stopping cheaters

This is what OP said, and it’s completely correct. It’s not that much impact in comparison to “regular” anti cheat systems. And both of those only detect either cheap/bad or known hacks.

Server-sided and data based anti cheats is what would actually be a huge step up. You’re running a 8 K/D in a game where the best players are between 1-2? Banned. You just flicked two enemies within 100ms? Banned. Suspicious activity that’s not that blatant needs to be reviewed.

The thing is - that’s fucking expensive, complicated and needs to be done one a per-game basis, and since its just cheaper to throw you under the bus with a kernel anticheat and claim it’s the best one, that’s being done.

Read up on the dangers.

Anything is beatable, hackable and abusable given the time and resources, and it shouldn’t be my system because some idiotic management took the decision to enforce ring0 access anti cheat to ban some percent more hackers.

No one said that anti cheat efforts do not make an impact, but the impact of ring0 anti cheats is massively overrated