It depends on the nature of the code and codebase.
There have been many occasions when working in a very verbose enterprise-y codebase where I know exactly what needs to happen, and the LLM just types it out. I carefully review all 100 lines of code and verify that it is very nearly exactly what I would have typed myself.
If the false positive rate is consistently 0.0%, that is a surefire sign that the detector is not effective enough to be useful.
If a false positive is libel, then any useful malware detector would occasionally do libel. Since libel carries enormous financial consequences, nobody would make a useful malware detector.
I am skeptical that changing the wording in the warning resolves the fundamental tension here. Suppose we tone it down: "This executable has traits similar to known malware." "This website might be operated by attackers."
Would companies affected by these labels be satisfied by this verbiage? How do we balance this against users' likelihood of ignoring the warning in the face of real malware?
The problem is that it's so one sided. They do what they want with no effort to avoid collateral damage and there's nothing we can do about it.
They could at least send a warning email to the RFC2142 abuse@ or hostmaster@ address with a warning and some instructions on a process for having the mistake reviewed.
I'm not asking about this specific case. There are plenty of examples of Google wrongly accusing others of being malicious with massive business impact
If religion had been the cause of a lasting difference, I would have expected it to go in the opposite direction. Articulate, persuasive, emotive public testimony done in a declamatory style is part of the fabric of historical American Christianity, much more than the mostly liturgical traditions of British Christianity.
If there is a difference in communication skills, I don't think religious history explains it.
Interesting perspective. I don't find many religious people articulate or persuasive. And how often do they have to give public testimony?
The pilgrims lived in Holland for years in exile before deciding to go to the new world. It would seem to take an extreme group of people to do that, but articulate isn't one of the traits I would assign to them.
A year ago someone on HN said “I can confirm that iMessage is extremely common in Australia. WhatsApp is very uncommon, outside of people with European (and maybe South American?) friends or family to keep in touch with.”
I can also confirmed that iMessage is basically unused in France. (And that was a core argument in the EU of Apple against the DMA for iMessage, so even Apple admits its low usage in the EU)
The issue with iMessage outside the US is the branding, it's branded as an SMS app and SMS being dead (outside of ads and delivery drivers) doesn't help for adoption.
iMessage is popular in the US because everyone has an iPhone because everyone has iMessage and everyone connects it to social status - network effects. The same reason (besides the social status) everyone uses WhatsApp in Europe.
This has more to do with the way the iPhone was launched, and the American desire to own the most expensive product, than any technical merits.
This might not be charitable, but my perspective is that some of the advocates want it both ways.
I would be interested in seeing an MIT/BSD licensed project saying, from the beginning, something like "This project is available under a permissive license, but I have a strong ethical expectation of my users to give me money if they build a product off of this work. I am fully aware that I can't legally enforce this, but I will certainly call you out publicly for your greed and lack of respect for my wishes."
My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code. (Call me naive but I think this is plausible.) They would rather give the impression that the code is truly no-strings-attached, because that would help drive adoption. Then later they can come back and say they ought to be given a cut.
> My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code.
Definitely. And not only companies; even Debian rejected some packages because the upstream owners added restrictive "desires" on top of the actual licenses.
Permissively licensed software is intentionally designed to be used by anybody for any reason with essentially no restrictions beyond attribution. Advocates of permissive licenses explicitly reject the argument that commercial users ought to have any kind of obligation to the authors. "Thief" seems like a category error here.
For people who want to make money down the line, what is so hard about selling commercial licenses? Or better yet using GPL so that your software is still open source but the big commercial users will still want to pay you for a separate license?
WordPress is GPL - the GPL, like all "Open Source" (using OSI's definition) licenses enables commercial use, and that is a subset of one of the FSF's core principles (The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose).
By WPE - I don't think anyone has even claimed that informally - since they don't distribute software and WordPress is GPL not AGPL it would be hard to. Moreover they (according to themselves) use an unmodified version of WordPress which would make it next to impossible. Of course according to Matt they use “something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress” but “is not WordPress.” And is a “cheap knock off” or a “bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code.” [1] but there's still no claim that they distribute that simulacra.
By Matt - no one has claimed it formally but I think there's at least a plausible claim that he has violated part 6 with his attempts at extortion, which requires "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein". Especially clearly as it pertains to any existing nominative use's of the WordPress trademarks within the unmodified WordPress code (which trademark law in no way prohibits WPE from using, and Matt demanded were changed).
It was pretty different in a way that brought millions of people into WordPress, but it has evolved in a way that makes a lot of sense to people, clarifying what WordPress is, what the host is, and what the application layers on top of it are. And the new AI / Telex / Studio stuff is super cool.
Please see my response to Matt's sibling comment. If this is truly your own opinion, and you can't see that it is just laughably wrong, then you're definitely working in the right place!
Please tell me where you can run arbitrary PHP code in the cloud for free, I'm curious to see how they manage that and what limits they put before they start charging.
We've invested a ton in products like WordPress Studio, which let you run unlimited local copies of WordPress with however many plugins, themes, etc you want.
I'm talking about how from something like 2005-2017, you couldn't install plugins at all.
Then from 2017 until apparently the last couple months, you had to upgrade past the Free, Personal and Premium plans to the $25/mo Business plan in order to install plugins.
Now it looks like its just your free tier can't do it - I suppose that's fine. 20 years of providing a bastardized simulacra of wordpress was long enough!
All other hosts have always provided full-fledged wordpress with plugin installation with all plans
But, of course you knew all of that and were just trying to misdirect people, yet again. I now fully expect some half-truth pedantic response about a technicality about dates, plan names, or a niche host who also provides a simulacra.
As the lead of the software I do have an opinion about which functionality is core to the user experience and which isn't. The WP.com paid plans offered a ton, including unlimited traffic, 24/7 support, stats, multi-datacenter replication, and dozens of more features above what most paid WP hosting plans offer, but we reserved custom code at the higher-priced plans. Due to getting more efficient over the years, we can now offer it on all paid plans, but that wasn't economically feasible before. There are dozens of other WordPress Multi-site hosts like Edublogs that offer the same trade-off we used to, it's built into the core code. I'm sorry that wasn't a good fit for your needs, but it has worked well for millions of people over two decades.
Maybe you think Coca-cola should taste a certain way, and want to sell that to consumers, but without commercial rights to the trademark you can't do that under the Coca-cola brand, you have to call it something else.
As you know, this discussion has nothing to do with the WordPress trademark (which, among plenty of other things, you lied about for many years)
It has to do with you calling WP Engine a "hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress" for turning off post revisions, which are an extremely minor part of WordPress (and could be turned back on upon request).
All while - rather than "reserv[ing] custom code at the higher-priced plans" (which is yet another baffling lie) - for the first 12+ years, custom code and plugins (the core of Wordpress and open-source) were completely unavailable[0]. And then for another 8 years it was only available on $25+ plans.
So, I reiterate: WP dot com is/was the most hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WP anywhere.
But, apparently by your logic, when you cheat the IRS via self-dealing and lie to the entire WordPress community about relinquishing control over WP, only to secretly take it back in the same day, that gives you the right to sell RC Cola as Coca Cola - causing endless confusion to newcomers about what Wordpress really is. It was "WordPress with an asterisk" [1] as you yourself recently put it - except there was never any asterisk anywhere, and especially so til 2017.
You're really not good at this Matt. You should get off the internet.
p.s. Lest you claim, like you have so many times when faced with criticism, that I am a paid shill for WP Engine: No one should use either of your services.
The opinion that those who consume should contribute back is not wrong, and as an open source contributor I fully agree, but it should be understood that anything free is going to be taken. We are an imperfect people in an imperfect world, after all.
I don’t put old furniture on the curb with a FREE sign expecting someone to knock on my door and offer $100 for it. I expect it to be gone without a trace. If I want something, even if it’s 1% of the value, then I’ll have a yard sale. It’s no different here.
Licensing is a form of conveying expectations. Putting an MIT license in my repo conveys that I expect absolutely nothing in return, just like the free sign on the stuff I tossed out.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization.
Who is telling you that you have to write open source software? Millions of programmers around the world make a living writing software with much more restrictive licenses (including simply All Rights Reserved). I write proprietary code, and I don't feel any pressure to stop doing that. Somebody on the internet telling me that I should write open source software instead is not an issue. They can't stop me from making money writing code.
Edited to add: I don't own the rights to my code but I am fairly compensated for it. If I were to write code that I have direct ownership of, the above principles would still apply.
> CC-BY-SA-NC isn't OSI approved and you get told you're "not open source" if you try to use it or licenses like it.
CC-BY-SA-NC is indeed not open source, but that doesn't mean you can't use it.
Well, then we've found the problem. You ideologically disagree with the framing of free software. That's fine!
Millions of people use Linux every day, run iPhones with BSD code and run software made with open source libraries. They download Javascript resources and freely-licensed Unsplash JPEGs to populate a webpage interpreted with a KHTML fork. If you think they're stealing, that's an extremist ideology that is not reflected in the spirit of any open source project I'm aware of.
> Embrace extend extinguish. Now Manifest v2 is gone.
You keep on hammering on this point and I don't think it makes sense the way you think it does. Manifest v2 (and extensions in general!) are a feature which Google created and added to Chrome entirely themselves. I'm not a fan of what they did in Mv3 either, but it's their feature, and it's their prerogative to change it. If you're arguing that something (the license?) should prevent them from making changes to their software which you don't like, whatever you're imagining has drifted rather far away from open source.
Google is playing chess at a level where we mere mortals can only be bystanders.
They can invest billions of dollars into a piece of software that the entire world benefits from. I wouldn't call it pure benevolence or charity, but I'll give them that. It's useful software that they didn't have to write or give away.
The problem is that Google isn't one person. It's a collection of forces seeking to optimize the overall position and profitability of the company. Even if that means that they might impinge upon or even willfully pilfer from the broader commons.
Chrome is now a central chess piece in controlling the web, advertising, and search. Maybe it didn't start that way, but it's what it has become - intentionally or not. And now that most people are using Chrome, Google is free to boil the frog, tighten the noose, etc. Their grip on the funnel is iron clad, and they can apparently operate monopolistically without interference from the DOJ.
Chrome might be open, but you won't be able to afford to deviate from Google's choices. The engineering hurdles are too steep for small teams to overcome. And because of browser monoculture, the experience with other browsing technologies and platforms degrades.
The result is that we're being herded like cattle. I don't think the folks at Google think of us this way, but that's how it is in practice. Behavior at scale to increase profits.
Google gets to proudly proclaim that Chrome is "open source". But in reality the only force that can meaningfully steer the product - the entire web ecosystem at this point - is Google. And they use that power against us.
Open source is a strategy for big tech. In the case of Matt vs WP engine, it's simply enabling a vulture company to dip into the tip jar without tipping out.
My point is that "open source" isn't entirely pragmatic about users and freedom. In some very real cases it's inequitable and not sustainable. By empowering monopolizers, it's orthogonal to user benefit.
Amazon gets to steal databases and make managed offerings that pull profit from the originators into AWS' coffers instead.
Google gets to, well, own the web and search and everything.
WP Engine gets to dip into Wordpress' decades of hard work.
I don't see how the users benefit. Just the greedy growth minded profiteers.
Users aren't even in the conversation. The conversation is entirely about who profits and controls. And that is, to me, what's fucked up about all of this.
> Don't be too kind to the trillion dollar company.
They got to be worth a trillion dollars somehow. I hate Apple with the passion of a million suns; guess what? They sell something people want. They make money, they survived. Their copyright is preserved equally as well as the AS-IS terms of the BSD license. And despite being whipped like a dog, there are still multiple BSD OSes with modern software packaged for them.
> We let these giant companies use open source to make the internet and technology more centralized and less free.
Do "we"? I'm running Firefox right now, maybe you're on an iPad or some other platform that locked you down. But that's your problem, if it concerned you then you should have returned it to the Apple store.
People still have a free choice to run whatever software they want. Wordpress is not being made "less free" because hosting companies won't get out of bed to pay Matt's bills. If the project has to die to prove it, it will die as a free program. It will still be forkable and maintainable by the community because that was the intention and spirit of the project.
> Google is very good at this game.
No, the fed is just particularly bad at it.
Google's big problem is that they monopolize online advertising and the DOJ refuses to neuter them. If your free access to the internet gets tragically cut off by Apple's indignant software policies... not my problem, is it?
I almost totally agree with you, with the exception that I think market distortion does impact non-users.
You can be a Firefox user, and your Firefox usage is impacted by the overwhelming market share capture of Chrome and Chromium browsers.
You can use Librem and be impacted by your government requiring software that will only run on iOS or Android. Or Chrome.
> DOJ refuses to neuter them
Yes, but don't give them the free pass. Even if a company's objective is to take as much of the pie as possible, Google and Apple actively employ lawyers to skirt the regulators.
I expect my experience will degrade. The whole web's felt stale since Flash died, I doubt the next few years will feel any different. We're post-that, sadly. Apple and Google already got the pass, they won't be litigated in this admin unless they fail to kiss the ring.
We have to live with these damages, the same way we've limped alongside a broken internet for the past decade. Its possible these abuses will be encoded in American identity for decades to come. The next step is surviving top-down control, and freely-licensed software will be the only alternative to the digital monoculture.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization, because that's not open.
The overwhelming majority of software is not opensource. Somehow the people writing and presumably making a living from them get by just fine.
> And I'm sick of the "but actually his license enabled that" excuses. It's victim blaming.
Publishing code under an opensource licence and then going hysterical about people using that code as allowed by the licence is suggestive of a mental disorder.
Democratic Party voters seem to be more aligned with Euro-style socialist policies, but among elected Democrats this is a small minority view.
European socialists usually advocate for direct state ownership of certain industries, sector-wide union contracts, universal (not means-tested) child allowances, fully public health care, wealth taxes, free college, etc. There are a handful of elected Democrats that sign on to some of these views, but these have never been in the actual party platform, since the mainstream of the party roundly rejects these. Democrats are only somewhat radical in certain social/bioethical issues like abortion and LGBT rights (although the latter is being tested, with some influential Dems defecting); otherwise, the better European analogue would be Macron's Renaissance party (formerly En Marche), the UK's Lib Dems, the Nordic countries' social liberal parties.
I don't think there's particularly good alignment even on that "axis" (it isn't really an axis, because most things are not inherently one or the other.) A good example of that is the "sector wide union contracts" thing. The default "leftist" position in the US is that things that apply to an entire sector should be legislated rather than negotiated by workers
The US does have child allowances, by the way - during Covid, it was even increased and paid out monthly instead of annually. Increasing it as of late seems to be an "R" policy, at least on the Trump wing.
Are there European countries that offer free college regardless of academic achievement during high school?
This is why I'm so glad that I work in a closed monorepo now. There is no package management, only build tooling.
I find myself nodding along to many of the technical and organizational arguments. But I get lost in the licensing discussion.
If it is a cultural problem that people insist on giving things away for free (and receiving them for free), then viral licenses can be very helpful, not fundamentally pernicious.
Outside of the megaprojects, my mental model for GPL is similar to proprietary enterprise software with free individual licenses. The developer gets the benefits of open projects: eyeballs, contributors, adoption, reputational/professional benefits, doing a good deed (if that motivates them) while avoiding permissively giving everything away. The idea that it's problematic that you can't build a business model on their software is akin to the "forced charity" mindset—"why did you make something that I can't use for free?"
If you see a GPL'd bit of code that you really want to use in your business, email the developers with an offer of $X,000 for a perpetual commercial license and a $Y,000/yr support contract. Most are not so ideologically pure to refuse. It's a win-win-win: your business gets the software, the developers don't feel exploited, noncommercial downstream users can enjoy the fruits of open software, and everybody's contributed to a healthier attitude on open source.
Personally, I'd say that geometry and trigonometry seemed the least useful out of the high school math sequence. Trigonometry seemed like "Algebra 3: this time with identities to memorize" and geometry seemed mostly like an homage to Euclid. In my day-to-day life, algebraic thinking comes up much more often than geometric thinking, although of course I know this is not universally true.
Geometry is the classic introduction to proof and rigor, but if I were the benevolent dictator of the math curriculum, I would try to accomplish that with basic combinatorics, graph theory, or even a tiny bit of abstract algebra (proving basic arithmetic facts from the real number axioms, maybe modular arithmetic).
A lot of trig. Trig identities is my bête noire, though I would save off one day for them, after Taylor polynomials, to derive a few through practice that way. But I remember grinding on them for quite a while; I would just have one day and use them as Taylor fodder. (Taylor polynomials are not practically useful for most people but they are extremely important as "the simplest thing that converts transcendental functions into the world of the elementary arithmetic functions"; it is good to demystify how one might compute sine or cosine "from scratch".) But I wouldn't nuke trig out entirely as classical geometry is an almost unparalleled place to learn basic proof techniques and mathematical thinking in a playground where you are not distracted by a lot of arithmetic. I think I still like that better than graph theory, and simple trig/geometry is in fact practically useful for a chunk of the students we're pushing through these courses. It would just get toned down.
I would cut out a lot of integration grinding. The concept of integration is extremely important, and I want the students introduced to the ideas of doing it symbolically, but the details of all of the manipulations are much less important than the concepts. I would retain only things that are of mathematical interest, like integration by parts (useful as an exercise in how much fluidity you have in doing math and a good check you understand the concept).
Symbolic differential equations I'd cut down a lot. I think there's a sense in which they are useful but the utility is not revealed until a couple of semesters in. Even my college semester was frankly not that useful, you really need to dedicate yourself to them to get the value out of them. I'd put in some more work on numeric integration, and working with computers to get them done. The concepts of differential equations are super, super, super important; the exact knowledge of how to solve this super precise form of this exact differential equation is not. More practical experience to teach intuition, less grinding on symbolic details. The net time spent on them if I were writing the curriculum might even go up, because I'd tip in some (very) basic chaos mathematics here instead of all that grinding.
Matrices I'd have a hard think about. HN is at the epicenter of their utility so it might be hard to see that for most people it's not all that useful in any sense. I might like to move them on to a very explicitly STEM-focused track.
If that sounds horrible, remember that my whole point here is that there's a lot of stuff that should be in the curriculum that currently isn't, or is just glossed over very briefly. Like, I'd like more work spent on basic financial math, both for personal finances and doing things like a bit of running stochastic financial scenarios (integrate this into the stats curriculum, for instance). Which also brings up the idea of doing more simulations of somewhat larger statistical scenarios than you can solve as a closed form by doing Monte Carlo simulations; statistics and probability is very important but for most people it spins off into the symbolic weeds when in fact most problems people will have in real life are not cleanly amenable to such things. (This might also help erase the implicit belief that stats tends to teach that everything is uniformly distributed.)
The curriculum as it is is also structured as an unmotived series of solutions to problems the students don't have. I would try to give them the problems before the solutions; e.g., if I'm building a stats curriculum around simulations that go into symbolic math rather than just handing them symbolic math from the beginning, imagine covering the Central Limit Theorem from the point of view of me giving out a couple of different simulation assignments that all "happen" to converge to it despite very different scenarios, and we can discuss & teach why the seemingly totally different scenarios produced such a similar outcome, rather than just handing it down from On High as a Solution to a problem none of them have.
You can't have things like that if you aren't willing to cut something else because we are full up right now. There's a lot of room now for people to get more intuitive grasps of these things by virtue of working with them through practical numeric integration, Monte Carlo simulations, maybe we'll do a brief section on enough 3D geometry to do a useful introduction to 3D modelling/CAD/CNC/3D printing/the whole complex of modern tools available that use some form of 3D modelling, there's so much useful stuff that's just aching to be let in that the culling of the old needs to be a bit aggressive after a century.
To be honest I'd not cover this dimensionality stuff, except perhaps as a special-interest side day or something. It's not bad to do a few of those, just to expose students to the diversity in math. I got graph theory like that in my own high school, and it can stay that way; I wouldn't amp it up any. Dimensionality does pivot nicely into fractals and fractals have notoriously pretty pictures associated with them, so maybe I'd sneak it in with that.
Are you talking high school or university maths? Australia had (and probably still has) financial and tax-based maths in high school (as well as intro stats).
High school, and even more particularly, the stuff we serve up to everyone, hence my reference to STEM-specific specialization for matrices.
In university you have the specialization to do as you need to do, e.g., serve up matrices to those who need them, serve up real analysis to those who need that, etc. And while HN is obviously fairly STEM-focused, a lot of majors in University won't get any math at all if you think about it, only just enough to have the fig leaf of a liberal education.
You've made me realize that I probably have a subconscious bias against science and engineering.
My view of the ideal math curriculum is very humanistic, focusing on the broad civic and intellectual value of formal reasoning, statistical fluency, etc. I never liked the in-the-weeds numerical stuff you get in science and engineering, but it's what the world is built on.
Despite my personal STEM focus I'd lean into that. I'm more interested in teaching mathematical modes of thought and some forms of mathematical intuition. I suspect grinding on symbolic computations is intrinsically necessary for that, but at the same time, I don't think it's sufficient, and that's what's missing from our curriculum right now. As evidenced by the people who come out of high school with all sorts of symbolic manipulation ability and still effectively no mathematical intuition or thought patterns to speak of. Then the symbolic manipulation abilities, unsupported by intuition or thought patterns, simply fade away with minimal impact on the person's life.
For me, the big takeaway that everyone cannot leave high school without is statistical critical thinking.
When you come across a meme with a graph, what should you say about it?
To me, that kind of thing comes before the stuff we think of as math. Calculus, matrices, geometry, all that stuff. People can learn those things if they are interested.
If they are bamboozled by bad statistics, society is finished.
There have been many occasions when working in a very verbose enterprise-y codebase where I know exactly what needs to happen, and the LLM just types it out. I carefully review all 100 lines of code and verify that it is very nearly exactly what I would have typed myself.
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