Yeah the piece that "stacking" also really helps on is code-review. So When you have the "contextual" diff in the second PR you can get different stake-holders to review that one, while maybe not needing them on PR 1 for example.
It also allows you to stay unblocked the entire time you're waiting on these dependent PRs.
For "how they do it on github": the way we do it at Graphite (spoiler I work there), is that we make the unit of change a PR instead of a commit. ie. every PR has one small commit, and these get stacked on top of each other. The tool itself abstracts some of the complexity out of rebasing and managing all of these stacked PRs (which in the article are referred to as stacked diffs).
Yeah kind of. It's just a bit confusing to read about presented as an entirely different/novel thing when it's pretty much my mental model of git and how I use it anyway.
If PR2 is done before PR1 is merged I tend to put it up as a draft with the target branch set to that of PR1, and say it depends on PR1. Then the diff shown is only PR1..PR2 anyway.
AIUI what I don't get doing that is the ability to potentially merge PR2 before PR1? But then it depended on it for some reason anyway, so..? (And I gain the ability to still have multiple commits in a PR / reviewed 'thing'.)
"Was it dumb luck? We don't have evidence of insider trading. But[...]"
Every article covering politicians, left and right, nowadays is like this. Do we know this is true? Nope! Will that stop us from making wild accusations? Also no!!!
As a data point, the author was interviewed on NPR's "The Indicator"[1], and the way this review summarizes it might not capture what her point was:
> CHENG: I'm not trying to answer whether math is real or not. I'm trying to show that considering the question at all leads us to interesting thoughts. And in the end, what I say is that, with all these questions, I don't think there are yes-or-no answers, and we shouldn't claim that there are. What we should do instead is say there is a sense in which - you know, what is the sense in which math is real, and what is the sense in which math isn't real?
> And the thing is, I think a lot of people who say math isn't real are using that to say, oh, so it's irrelevant and stupid. Why should we study it? It's made up. And what I want to say is that just because it is made up doesn't mean that it's irrelevant. And actually, the fact that it's kind of made up makes it really powerful because - well, it makes it really, in a way, more accessible because you don't need a lot of money to get it. All you need is an imagination. And I think that's a really amazing thing about it. And just like fiction isn't real, but fiction can give us insights about the world around us to highlight much more, specifically, things about society. And that's what I think is powerful about abstract math as well - because we're not constrained by reality.
I haven't read the book, but it seems like the title may be a throwaway question meant to pique the reader's interest and say "let's get philosophical about math".
This is an idea that goes back to Pythagoras and Plato.
Think of a triangle. Now draw that triangle on paper. If you look closely enough, you'll see "imperfections" in the triangle you just drew. Now ask yourself: "how do I know this thing I just drew is imperfect? Where did the idea of a perfect triangle come from?"
Plato would say the perfect triangle comes from the realm of "forms". This mystical place which is "more real" than "reality" because everything there is perfect and everything here is just a flawed approximation. Plato also said that this is the place where our souls go when we die, and we engage in "congress" with the forms and then return to earth, reincarnated. When we learn things, we aren't learning something new but actually recalling memories of the forms. This is why everyone knows what a perfect triangle is but no one has ever seen one in the physical world.
Because the Platonic soul (psuche) is different from consciousness. Actually, Philolaus (first Pythagorean to write a book) said that conscious feelings come from the combination of the mathematical soul with the body. So, Pythagorean soul can be viewed as the set of logical or conceptual forms— which constitute a person, yet can also be passed on from person to person. That’s a very different kind of reincarnation…!
There is, almost certainly, an objective universe that exists outside of human minds, and it also seems likely that all of mathematics can be determined through objective mechanisms.
"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded."
Profoundly sad, and completely avoidable. Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.
Reminds me of something I once heard a VP say at a very old, established company. Something along the lines of, "Our brand is trust. It took 90 years to build it, but it would take just one day to destroy it."
The point he was making was that this old, established company's biggest asset was its brand, and its brand identity was just "trust" (they made professional products, and others could undercut them, but pros would always return to buy from them because they knew they would get what they paid for).
It's the kind of attitude I think every toolmaker (software or otherwise) should keep in mind. Professionals value trust more than they do dollars in their pocket, and the companies with the best reputation and longevity understand that.
But also that company was privately owned by a family, and their name is still over the front door. I think that when the execs answer to people whose name is synonymous with the products and culture of the organization, avoiding short term profit motivated garbage strategy is part of your MO.
As an example here, my father and grandfather used to swear by Craftsman tools. No matter the context, if there was a Craftsman version, they'd go for it because they implicitly trusted the quality.
Then the Craftsman brand downshifted its production quality to compete in price and their reliability fell through the floor. Now my family will skip over Craftsman entirely even if it's competitive in price, since the breach of perceived trust soured them on the brand so completely.
Lowe's supposedly honors the Craftsman lifetime warranty. I haven't tried it, last time I needed to use the warranty was 30 years ago when in the middle of some car repair job I was doing I took the busted wrench into Sears, still dressed in my grimy clothes I was wearing and covered in grease, I handed them the broken wrench and they simply handed me a new one. No questions asked, no paperwork. They handed me a new one and I walked out the door.
I don't doubt there are plenty of experiences that went the wrong way, but wanted to share an alternative anecdote that went well.
I bought a brand new ~$900 GE dishwasher last year (for a non-intended purpose) and needed to take it apart - for reasons.
IMO, the engineering in this thing was just marvelous. It was almost entirely tool-free click/snap fittings for full disassembly and reassembly. The parts were good quality molded, stamped or machined. It was clearly a master class in balancing competing trade-offs (price, assembly labor, reliability, noise, power, efficiency, etc). The simplicity of the thing was really remarkable.
Water falls into the side at whatever rate your tap delivers, and when a pressure sensor in the reservoir indicates enough volume to start, the thing begins. It does this a few times, pumping, re-pumping, heating and replacing that reservoir depending on the selected cycle, but overall, the thing is just incredibly simple and (hopefully, somewhat?) reliable.
In Haier's case they bought way more than "just" the GE sticker. Haier is still using factories built by GE Appliances for many of their GE branded appliances and in many cases using the same people/processes/pipelines as before.
There's still plenty of nuance in these rebadging situations. It's also hard to tell without following a lot of business news whether the new owner just bought "the stickers" or bought all the original factories or bought some complicated deal in between.
While I was pleased with this particular purchase, my ability to trust any brand in general has been diminishing with age and each new betrayal of that trust.
I have a growing heuristic that is (at least in part) inversely related to number of employees and the time a company has been publicly traded.
On the bright side, due to how the Power Tool industry works, that Craftsman is in many cases the previous gen Dewalt for 1/3 the price. Others are Porter Cable in red and without a sales rep. I’m tied to Ryobi batteries but I happily pick up Craftsman corded tools when those are an option.
Lol, yeah, if you Google “who owns which power tool brands” you can find the Rosetta Stone of tool brands to figure out which cheaper brands come from the same factories as the expensive stuff. It’s a web of deception for sure.
I’d totally bring one back if it failed because they forgot to harden it or something. Put it in some wood and the first time you use it the threads reverse because the metal is so soft.
It is plausible that it did not live up to reasonable expectations in some way. Equally likely that someone was being dishonest though.
Example: I once returned a board that I had cut in half. It was window trim with a shaped profile, and I had previously purchased and installed some of the same SKU before. When I went to install my freshly cut board next to the first ones, it was a little too obvious that it was from a different batch or manufacturer with a slightly different profile.
Same thing happened with Canadian Tire's "Mastercraft" brand. I think it was always viewed as a Craftsman knock off, but they used to have a lifetime warranty and pretty good quality. I now mostly regard Mastercraft as disposable junk.
Far too many companies these days are willing to burn down their brand for some quick bucks. It's so common that I'm sure it's part of the MBA curriculum.
It makes a difference. If you start with several quality brands and one of them sells out, you can switch to one of the others. If everyone pulls the same shit, there's nowhere to go.
this also happens on day to day consumer grade stuff. new brands of hotdogs will be yummy, the next batches will be shitty. same with bread from bakeries.
it's crazy how the loss in quality begets them increased profits in nthe short term, but costs them their entire business in the long term.
the high quality products can be the loss leaders, and they can just commoditize the compliments.
why would you reduce the size of bread, when you can just sell me overpriced peanut butter, jams, and spreads to come along with it?
a good lesson in trust and social psychology. when trust is built, people throw their money at you.
Sadly, I just assume that no company can be trusted these days.
It wasn't too long ago that the leadership of companies was often fairly stable. Now you see people rotating through every couple of years, rarely having to face the fallout of their bad decisions.
There are a few. Cockos makes an amazing Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that competes with the top names in the industry.
While much of the rest of the industry is moving to subscriptions or jacking prices, Cockos has kept their prices extremely low and push new releases consistently.
A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest, unless you can somehow guarantee their leadership won't change (or is unlikely to, at least).
> A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest
If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".
> > A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest
> If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".
They are doing "right thing" now so later when they dominate market they will be able to squeeze you like a lemon. Scorpion and a frog situation. It's just in their nature.
When does the “for now” stop? When is a brand actually a mark of a certain quality and when is it a facade for a swapped tooling line backed by a dozen products? We might have had reliable brands once, but no longer — now all products have to be evaluated individually.
I used to get some great stuff from icebreaker too, but after they were acquired by VF (also owners of Vans and North face), surprise, surprise, pretty much zero purchases since.
Because the owners are not in it for the long term. It’s an agent problem - if they can take a company with a 2% profit margin and juice that up to 10%, they’ve captured 5 years worth of profits in a single year. If it takes 5 years for the market to catch on that the company’s gone to hell, that’s 25 years worth of profits available for stock buybacks-err, new investments. The company’s dead within a decade, but the owners and investors got a bucket full of cash.
Under Clinton, there was an effort to tie executive compensation to company performance. The idea was good, but the consequence was that executives got paid much more in stock than in cash. That led executives to juice the stock price.
Your last point is very much true. If the family no longer controls their company, or even, just their founding members, it sets off a huge red flag for me. Sometimes, it's for the better. But, if I had trust in that company, it most likely stemmed from their work.
There are some nice examples of founding members going above and beyond to maintain their control, which may not look like it from the get go. Ubisoft comes to mind. I may not like some of their games, but I really appreciate the efforts of the Guillemot brothers.
On the other hand, founders stepping down as the company gets bigger or is faced with completely different challenges is usually for the better.
I can't imagine Daimler-Benz as it is now being led by the 3rd grandson of the original founder for instance. It would be a miracle if that person was well suited for directing a multi-national car manufacturer. Same way Microsoft wouldn't be the same if Bill Gates' son was at the helm.
If he's been groomed his whole life for running a multi national car company, there's reason to believe he would be better suited than just about anyone.
Thing is, education is hard and individual potential also varies a lot. We see this with royalty, where you have literally a country's resources to groom someone into being a high level individual who can deal with most social situations, but having them lead and expand a whole country in another issue altogether.
You'll have some Louis XIV sometimes, and many Louis XVI the rest of the time, with sprinkles of Charles II in the mix to spice it up.
You'd think, but as the old saying goes: clogs to clogs in three generations.
(Meaning: the first generation starts off poor, is self made, hands over to the second generation which is less dynamic, which hands over to the third who wreck it and end up poor clog wearers again)
I don't know how much people know or have heard about ironSource. It's kind of an open secret in Israel on how they built a company to profit by building what is essentially malware (installers disguised as OEM while they're really adding extra trackers to your computer). They always paid 25% more than most of the other tech companies, but still had issues recruiting because it takes a special kind of person to be willing to do these kinds of things
I didn't really understand the merger when it happened, but I have no doubt all these new policies are a result of the ironSource people integrating into Unity
The merger makes a ton of sense — Unity was super late to the game building their own Demand-Side Platform for ads, and that’s how you make money in mobile games now, so they had to buy their way out of the problem.
I mean, it’s horrible for consumers/gamers/developers, obviously, but from a business perspective it was the correct move.
I doubt this was a sensible business perspective at all. They would have different audiences to consider and they didn't. This fallout is pretty much the invoice for that strategy.
It may come up as one of the worst decision in the modern industry. Granted, time will tell and nothing is certain.
Well, clearly not, if the community is going to have a fallout with the product and never trust it again. You can have the most maggotty type of an ad company, if you don’t have shelf space to show ads you won’t be making money.
IronSource is the good guy of ad-tech. Anyone that says something else just don't know anything about it. You can ask google security team.
Apploving wanted to merge Unity instead of IronSource because they knew the combined power of Unity/iron and apple will hurt their business.
All the buzz now is due to apploving UniFree project...
"Good will" is an asset just like any other to be spent when the time is right. Sometimes a company will make the wrong bet and accidentally go out of business. Far more often there is a ton of backlash, their reputation goes in the tank, then they spend the next couple years building good will back up until the majority of people forget all about the past transgressions. Meanwhile the unpopular decision makes stacks of cash. Repeat the cycle ad-infinitum.
To clarify, I don't endorse this behavior, but unfortunately, it's the modern way of business.
I guess it's a gamble on whether you could gain users faster than you'd be losing them. Either way I don't think this can be the case with Unity due to how niche their product is with many alternatives (including free ones).
Just like you never step in the same river twice, you never do business with the same company twice. Staff and executives change over time, and companies shift for better or worse.
Should we hold grudges against brands for things totally different people did 10? 20? 50? years ago? That seems weird to me.
Unity specifically deserves loss of trust and all the pain they get. But in 5 years, or 10 years or whatever, should we assume they are less trustworthy than other companies because of what this group of managers did?
If you drink from a river and get cholera, would you drink from that river again in the future?
It might be fine! Maybe on that particular day, somebody with cholera had just taken a shit upstream, and the bacteria are totally gone now. But it's still a useful prior, and that's the case here with whom you choose to conduct business.
I think it's a question of burden of proof. You'd ordinarily not worry too much about cholera, but after an incident you'd want the water thoroughly and repeatedly tested. You probably would not say "eh, it's been 5 or 10 years, it's most likely fine."
Similarly you'd want some concrete evidence that a company has actually changed, in a degree sufficient to offset your negative prior, before you'd consider engaging in any further business with them.
But actually doing that research is a pain in the ass, so I think it's a reasonable strategy to simply prefer companies that haven't screwed you over wherever good options exist.
> If you drink from a river and get cholera, would you drink from that river again in the future?
No. Further, I'd stop drinking untreated water from all rivers. (Just answering your hypothetical. I spend a lot of time in the wilderness and wouldn't drink untreated water from a river or lake to begin with.)
This effect, though, has happened with software for me years ago. Enough bad actors exist that I've reached the place where I trust very few software houses (and I trust exactly zero SV-style companies). Not that all of those rivers are polluted, of course, but that it's impossible to tell which ones are and which ones aren't by looking at them.
I would never dare to start a business that depended on any of them. The risk is simply too great.
I was going to observe that another totally-understandable reaction to getting fucked in a business transaction (or getting cholera from untreated water) is to begin researching everyone you do business with (or testing/treating all the water you drink).
I may be stretching the limits of the analogy here, but either way that "verify, then trust" approach is more work than "adaptive blissful ignorance", and a lot of people aren't going to do it, or will at least slack off as the pain of the original incident becomes a more distant memory.
"verify, then trust" is problematic in a world where companies get bought and sold, management changes, business goals shift, etc.
The only protection against this is contracts, but when a company -- like Unity has done twice now -- decides to retroactively change the terms of existing contracts, that means that you cannot trust them at all going into the future even if they're solidly "good" right now.
The thing is, I think no amount of research would have pointed to this possibility. At least it would not a couple of years back. The mere fact that this group in OP exists/existed would have pointed to their trustworthiness.
There are limits to what open source can do too. Perhaps it's necessary, but not sufficient?
There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.
> There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.
And that's still better than being stuck with arbitrary price changes.
Does that actually happen all that much? In the cases I can think of (OpenOffice.org, ffmpeg, OpenWRT), the community ended up concentrating around either the original project or the fork (in other words, the community didn’t really splinter, just move).
Having a tarball of the source code for something isn't the same as having the community, the history, the culture, the processes, the infrastructure ... all the accumulated other stuff that makes up an open source project.
Without the concentration of diverse efforts that go into maintaining and advancing a project, having the source code (alone) is of minimal benefit.
> Should we hold grudges against brands for things totally different people did 10? 20? 50? years ago? That seems weird to me.
You've inverted the sense here, by treating reputation as something based on default trust and exceptional "grudges". What has really happened is that they've destroyed the exceptional positive reputation they spent the past decade and a half building. A new reputation can certainly be built over the next decade, but for now they're mostly back to the default state of deserving no trust.
Does it depend on the company culture, which can persist awhile?
For example, the first company that comes to mind has seemed to have shameless underhandedness deep in its DNA, and to exhibit its malevolent side each new chance it gets, as much as it can. This has repeated over the course of decades, and over multiple top leadership changes.
If it's true that certain kinds of underhandedness are in that company's DNA, to a degree unlike most other companies, I wonder how deep they'd have to decapitate the org chart, to cut out the roots of that culture. Including SVPs? VPs? Further? It's in the board, too?
I actually had a different company in mind. I'm much less familiar with Oracle.
The one time I bumped into Larry Ellison, he managed to come across as intensely competitive, in just a moment. I'd guess that's probably reflected in his company.
Does Oracle seem a steady in-your-face aggressive, and you know what you get?
Or is more a cyclic and plotting: in-your-face shameless when they can get away with it, and makes nice when they have to, while running long-cons (some of them very underhanded)?
Sounds like everyone knows roughly what the relationship with Oracle will be like. :)
Around some other vendors, there's collective loss of institutional (field) knowledge about what you're going to get.
I suppose contributing to this could be a lot of new people who aren't mentored-in as well as they could be.
Also, there's been a field shift towards many (most?) ICs and even managers/execs not being incentived to become aware of non-short-term implications of vendor and tech choices. Whether it's ICs driven by sprint metrics, startups motivated to rapidly throw up appearances of growth to hit funding rounds, or people job-hopping every 18 months before they see longer-term cause&effect.
I think a nice thing about Google is that it seems many people there still believe that to some degree.
We certainly believed it when Google started, and they were talking like the then-familiar Internet-savvy altruistic forward-looking engineer types.
Today, you can still see many examples of Google doing things well. (And of course many examples of things that we wouldn't have expected them to do, including some that would've gotten them ostracized.)
> Should we hold grudges against brands for things totally different people did 10? 20? 50? years ago? That seems weird to me.
It only seems weird because it's irrational, but the irrationality of vengeance is what has made humans the dominant species on the planet.
If your child is killed by a lion it makes sense to avoid lions. It makes no rational sense to seek out lions to kill, but guess what a human will do. And see what the result is.
Except when they let go a few key personnel and mandate culture change from above. It's not as enduring, unfortunately, even if most of us would like it so.
I used to be able to buy amazing handmade items for reasonable prices and reasonable shipping from actual people running small storefronts on Etsy.
Now it’s just another e-commerce site that’s been completely and utterly overrun with marked up Aliexpress junk and low quality copies of anything novel that gains the slightest bit of popularity. The few remaining authentic sellers now charge so much it’s laughable unless you’re wealthy enough that cost isn’t a concern.
I'm assuming you're being sardonic, but remarkably it's still a great place to buy live cuttings of succulents and other plants from enthusiasts.
In contrast to buying seeds off Amazon or eBay, where the plants that sellers are claiming they're shipping you seeds for are often just random weeds rather than the hilariously photoshopped or non-existent flowers/fruits shown in the product listing.
And the dumb thing is that if they had listened to the engineers who were telling them the customer base was going to freak out at this, the company could have avoided large parts of the drama, since a few of their fixes were not even really a change in plan, so much as better more clear wording.
The big drama causes
1. People assuming unity was going to add additional telemetry to track installs. (Reality: Unity seemed to always be planning on using App store numbers and the numbers from any opt-in unity services as the basis of their model). This one was a complete communication failure by unity.
2. Announcing a new payment model never before used by the industry. This alone (without looking at the details) is not a huge deal, but it makes people nervous.
3. This metric is hard to measure, and unity's initial announcement was basically that they would be estimating it in their sole discretion, which makes people uncomfortable. Their fix was to allow self reporting the data, which must be based on something that reliably approximates the revised install count definition.
4. Unclear definition of install was used. What they eventually settled on: once per unique end user per distribution platform (e.g. app store), was pretty much what Unity was going for anyway, but the initial announcement royally messed up here.
5. The metric was abusable, and there was apparently no cap to it. This was honestly one of the biggest issues. This got fixed by adding the 2.5% revenue share cap.
6. Trying to make this apply retroactively to previously published applications. This was the other biggest issue. This was especially bad because only a few years ago the company had another smaller scandal, and promised to allow people to keep using the terms of service of each version as it was when people downloaded it. Indeed, for a while this was explicitly part of the terms, and people who used those versions probably could get a court to side with them.
If they had listened to their engineers, I think they could have fixed/avoided 1, 4, and 6. Numbers 3 and 5 may have remained, still causing huge outcry, and eventually getting fixed, but at least if number 6 were addressed before initial announcement, it would not have been a loss-of-trust issue so much as a: you are a moron for proposing this without the needed backstop, and requiring companies to blindly trust your estimations.
#1 would have been much less of a problem if it weren't for the IronSource merger [0]. When you merge with a spyware company and then announce you're going to use a weird new metric, it's entirely reasonable for your customers to assume you'll be using the spyware to measure that metric.
> 4. Unclear definition of install was used. What they eventually settled on: once per unique end user per distribution platform (e.g. app store), was pretty much what Unity was going for anyway, but the initial announcement royally messed up here.
That was not a miscommunication though: it was brought up directly to Unity and the initial response was that it would be per install, per device.
Yes and no. In practice evidence suggests they were planning to heavily rely on app store install counts for games not using unity services, and thus for which they had no better data. This is part of the reason why they were being so cagey about how they would estimate the install counts, because they would be heavily using relatively crude approaches like that. (and also hadn't fully worked out the details).
For IOS, for example, reinstalls don't increase that counter. I'm not sure how it works with the Play Store.
They almost certainly said that reinstalls would could because they might count for some platforms.
Plus, as a user of the endproduct and not the engine, I am not keen of my installs getting tracked.
It has become quite normal to create device identifiers, some crazy people do it in the name of security even, but I resist this development where I can.
And that's why people like Jonathan blow and Casey Muratori have for so many years now warned game devs about this and learn how to make a game engine from scratch. Hopefully some listened.
Being wary of large corporate engines is a good piece of advice. "Make a game engine from scratch" is a terrible recommendation and shouldn't be linked to the first one. Every dollar and hour spent on a custom engine isn't being spent on the end result. There's a place for it, sure, for people like Blow who are in love with the craft--but most indie game devs don't want to make an engine, they want to make a game.
There are also costs to use the ecosystem of an engine, as you need training and experience. The main advantage is that an ecosystem exists that can provide advanced tooling and resource management. There are quite a few alternatives if it is just rendering and general media playback. There are some generic frameworks to develop games, but most rely on custom architectures. Adapting the read-to-use engine takes time as well.
KFC really isn't cheap anymore. I went there the other day with some friends and was aghast at the prices. We left and went across the parking lot to the grocery store and got a big platter of fried chicken and a tub of slaw for less than half the price.
You can probably get that for much cheaper and better quality from your local grocery store chain’s deli.
When I still worked in an office, the grab and go section at the grocery market really helped me cut down on food costs/expenses. I use the grocery story grab and gos on roadtrips too. Bathrooms, massive food and drink selection (with alternatives to pop), good quality and at better price than you’d get from any fast food chain. Publix, Big Y, Meijers are all favorites for me.
And tumblr, when they announced they would no longer support creators of "adult" content.
And (nearly) OnlyFans, when they announced they would no longer support creators of "adult" content (aka, "did a tumblr"). They just about backpedalled quickly enough, and had enough stickyness (no pun intended) from followers, to contain most of the damage.
I don't understand how it is possible to advance to a decision-making role if someone is stupid enough to attempt to remove porn from OnlyFans, the household name for amateur porn.
I think Unity did a lot more damage than any of the above. D&D is still a powerful brand, and while they angered hardcore fans and creators, the vast majority of roleplayers didn't even notice, and those are their real customers. Tumblr is apparently still around, and OnlyFans is still synonymous with amateur porn. But Unity has only those creators as their customers, and those stake their livelihood on their trust in the company, and with that trust gone, Unity could lose all its customers.
I'm still upset at Sony for cancelling Star Wars Galaxies. I avoid Sony products now. I know its immature of me and the product most likely would have been eclipsed by other mmo tech that was coming out but thats the emotional response.
> "Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner - head of a chain of jewellery shops described his company's products as 'total crap' and that speech tanked the shares by £500M in 1991 money - around $1.2Bn equivalent today.
Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with).
I wonder if it's less about the source code here but about the people involved, and how to prevent a consolidation of capital and power in the hands of greedy financiers. Maybe developing the projects as nonprofits (like Blender or Mozilla), or at least employee co-ownership rather than VC money or institutional funders?
If only the laid off FAANGers could pool their fat checks and start up something employee-driven and not subject to outside influences, in the style of Valve or similar. And preferably with legal protections against "selling out".
> Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with).
Of course it can help. For example, when Oracle bought MySQL, it was forked and we got Maria. When Emby pissed off people, it was forked and we got Jellyfin. There are plenty of other examples.
Whether or not you like these products, the point is that open source gives the community the ability to continue development if the original project gets bought and/or otherwise changes its philosophy for the worse.
MariaDB, OpenTofu, etc... Those are the exceptions.
Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork, keeping the quality and innovation alive, and the community involved is hard.
There are many more failed forks than successful forks. So saying "you can fork" is utopist at best. Sure you can, but you'll probably be the only one maintaining it and it will slowly rot as there won't be a community to keep it bug-free and compatible with new hardware/standards.
I think it's a self regulating system. If the product was so important and so many people relied on it (eg. Unity) where a cash grab by the Unity development team results in the entire community considering switching to a completely different product (eg. Godot), then I'm sure the community would rather fork the existing product and make it better. On the other hand, if the product wasn't that important or the cash grab wasn't that bad, then fewer people will be likely to fork and the current product will continue to be the mainline. Open source gives users more options which is always better.
EGCS was eventually merged back into GCC (or rather it became the new GCC?). I don't pay attention recently, but XEmacs was/is pretty active along with Emacs.
I haven't seen any evidence in support of the original argument, though. Which open source projects have been killed explicitly by Big Tech that they didn't originally create? Microsoft spent ages trying to kill Linux but never succeeded.
You don't need to innovate on the foundation of your product. It's a game engine: If it fulfilled your needs when you started, it's fulfilling your needs now. With open-source solutions A) you can't have the rug pulled from under you, as you have a perpetual license, and B) you can fix/modify/add things yourself if the business needs arise.
With a proprietary solution, you might get A, but you have zero hope of B. It's an objectively worse proposition.
If my business is making games, I don't want to fix/modify/add things to a game engine.
You do need to innovate on the foundation if you plan to maintain your game long term: new consoles support, new hardware support, obsolescence of old platforms, etc...
You do not need to innovate if you plan to let your game rot and become unplayable 10-20 years later.
Yes having a FOSS solution for the foundation would be ideal. That was not the topic of the discussion. The topic was about the claim "we can fork if we're not in agreement".
No, as a game developer you won't be forking and maintaining a game engine. No a "just fork it" is not a viable solution in the majority of cases as you need a strong community behind you and your fork to make it last long term and not rot after 2 weeks.
Actually it's quite common for game dev studios to make custom mods to engines (source code to Unreal engine available here for example: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github). The idea with forking an open source engine as a game dev would not necessarily be to maintain it for the community, but to bring it in house and ensure continuity for your own projects.
That's fair, but if we consider the amount of game dev studio that have the resources (time and money) to do that, versus the amount of indie game devs and small studio who do not, I'm not sure that it's fair to say "you can just fork it".
The examples of successful forks are anecdotal, they are the exceptions not the rule. This is survivor's bias.
I can't think of a single example of an unsuccessful fork of a large project caused by a monetization change. So I am not convinced that success is the exception for that case.
> let your game rot and become unplayable 10-20 years later
Don't worry about it. Other people will literally solve that problem for you if they like your game enough no matter what you do. They won't even bother asking for permission.
Audacity made some bad decisions but the forks never got anywhere. That said, this particular issue was blown out of proportion, so the forks going nowhere isn't an issue.
> Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with).
True, but there's no rule that says you have to update when they do. You can just stick with what you have until/unless you find or create another option.
Ah, these comments again. Open source is great and I have my self contributed to several open source projects, but it is not the solution to everything. Products like Word/Excel/PowerPoint/etc, Visual Studio, Photoshop, Figma, Windows and Mac all have many open source alternatives, but the fact that these products and companies have been hugely successfully and continue to do so says something -- commercial companies can organize and reward work in a way hardly found in open source projects, and their products often provide added value (more features/specific support for certain workflows/professionally designed UX/product support etc) that can be rare or nonexistent in open source projects. For some thing that is as complicated as a game engine, maybe there is a reason open source solutions are not mainstream yet.
Open source solutions are not a magical solution to every problem. Open source solutions are often, if not more so, subject to the whims of just a few people.
Great advice… Unless you’re a game studio who wants to ship on PlayStation and Switch some day. If you want to build on an engine that lets you target proprietary platforms your options are, in practice, limited.
Providing these links without context, after claiming that MIT licensed engines won’t have any issues, sort of implies that open source engines can be used fine to target consoles.
The fact developers have been able to ship Godot games on console doesn’t help much unless those developers are willing to share whatever proprietary engine-to-console-SDK-interface code they wrote.
Unity and Unreal, in contrast, will happily license equivalent code to you.
I think this section of the second Godot link is worth pulling out and quoting:
> … it is impossible for Godot to include first-party console support out of the box. Even if someone would contribute it, we simply could not host this code legally in our Git repository for anyone to use.
> Additionally, it would not be possible to distribute this code under the same license that Godot uses (MIT) because this is in direct conflict with the proprietary licenses and non-disclosure terms that console manufacturers require to have access to the knowledge needed to write this code.
> To make it simple, it is not possible for Godot to support consoles as an open source project.
The Godot core developers have a company you can partner with for a Godot build for those platforms. It's not really a big deal if you're making the kind of money to make that port worth it.
> [...] sort of implies that open source engines can be used fine to target consoles.
That was my intention.
> The fact developers have been able to ship Godot games on console doesn’t help much [...]
Well, it demonstrates that it's entirely possible, either via DIY, hiring an in-house specialist or contracting to one of the companies who has already implemented the functionality.
> [...] unless those developers are willing to share whatever proprietary engine-to-console-SDK-interface code they wrote.
The third party porting companies are willing to "share" that code--for a fee. They could also do the same for free as long as they respect the terms of their contract with the console platform (which probably is along the lines of "don't disclose anything to people who don't also have a contact with the console platform").
A group of companies could even cooperate on this but we'd presumably not know the details.
> Unity and Unreal, in contrast, will happily license equivalent code to you.
Sure, but it's also neither free[0] nor Open Source, e.g.:
"Build and deploy to closed platforms such as Nintendo Switch™, PlayStation®, and Xbox®. An active Unity Pro subscription is required to access these build modules via developer platform forums."
The nuance of "it is not possible for Godot to support consoles as an open source project" is that "it is not possible for [the] Godot [Project] to support consoles as an open source project [but the Godot Enginecan be used on consoles if you write the support code yourself or license it from someone]".
Despite detailed explanations (from the devs) of the nuances, too many people interpret the situation as "you can't deploy Godot-based games on consoles" rather than "you can deploy Godot-based games on consoles but you can't get the code to do so from the Godot Project itself because vendors won't let it".
But perhaps for some people this isn't a significant distinction.
I mean, sure, but the situation is actually "we know multiple vendors who will compete & sell you what you need and if that's not satisfactory you can DIY".
At the end of the day the situation is entirely driven by the requirements of the console platform owners.
You can choose to:
* depend on a closed source proprietary game engine & console integration and associated risks/benefits; or,
* an open source game engine & console integration via one of multiple vendors or DIY and associated risks/benefits.
W4Games, owned by one of the core developers of Godot, will happily license a plugin module that allows you to do console export. So there's no difference here, it's just a plugin instead of part of the engine itself.
Under terms that are even less predictable and subject to capricious change than those of the major commercial engines.
The question developers are asking themselves is ‘if I start out building a game for the next two or three years, when I come to commercialize this, will I have palatable and viable options to do so?
Unity’s random adjustment of their terms is precisely what is driving developers away. But at least Unity is making it clear what those terms are. ‘Talk to one of us privately when you get to the point where you’re ready to port to a console’ is even less certain.
Can't Godot org itself offer the commercial support required for those projects that want/need to release on commercial platforms? It's not like they have to add those device-specific exporters on their main repo.
A key aspect is that neither Godot (the project--which doesn't exist as a legal entity) nor Godot Foundation (which exists as a legal entity but AIUI has restrictions on what activities it can perform) would be able to satisfy the requirements of the console platform vendors in terms of qualifying for access to a platform SDK.
The issue is that console SDKs are under NDA, meaning that open source tools can't target consoles because they would reveal details about the SDK. Some projects have workarounds for this, for example SDL maintains a private Switch port that you can get access to by emailing one of the maintainers with proof you're a Nintendo licensee.
There is no one open source, but various open source licenses.
Nintendo Switch and Playstation and titles from Sony and Nintendo incorporate BSD-licensed open source code, so it is obvious that “open source is banned” is not true. It’s only GPL and other viral licenses that lawyers argue is too risky, because it might require disclosing proprietary source when linked.
Look at the other comments in this thread, the reason is more complicated than that. Open source tools might be fine but game engines can't be open source if they want to support console builds because that would disclose proprietary information.
> game engines can't be open source if they want to support console builds because that would disclose proprietary information.
Technically, they could. It would require someone who hasn't actually licensed the SDK, and so aren't subjected to an NDA, to reverse-engineer things and produce their own implementation under an open source license.
Certainly would be an enormous project, but it is well within the realm of the possible. It's been done with complex systems before.
> that doesn't make it a viable alternative for the games industry.
It makes it legally viable, in that it would allow the production of an SDK that isn't restricted by any NDA, and therefore could be incorporated into opens source projects.
Not banned, just that every build platform has to be supported and not every open source project prioritizes each platform.
Godot, for example, doesn't support console builds, only working with a third party to facilitate porting to those platforms (that may change in the future now that they're getting a lot more support from the community after all this).
The only thing that could save face in this situation is the immediate removal of the CEO and any leadership that allowed this to happen. Short of that, Unity will always hold this badge of shame in the eyes of developers.
It's really more nuanced than that - from a business/financial perspective.
"goodwill" is a major component of a companies financial accounting. It's an asset and can be invested or squandered like any other asset. A large and well-run public company will have a risk management team evaluate the impact of major decisions on the financial health of the business. Clearly Unity did not do that. They are public, right? Seems to me (IANAL) this is a breach of fiduciary duty that could be actionable.
I'm sure even before Musk, most people considered Twitter the equivalent of soap opera. It was bad. It was tasteless. It was a time waster. But people just need to have something to scroll.
Unity, on the other hand, was actually loved by some devs. Of course it was buggy from time to time, but it was huge time-saver especially for mobile games.
I know you’re being sarcastic here, but indie game developers really don’t get compensated well enough unless they break very big. Most keep doing it for the passion.
To price your product so you make money to “stay afloat” with your tens of thousands engineers working mostly on ad tech or non-core stuff, while your customers are barely scraping is typically very bad strategy yes. You know how you can tell? They’ve lost a ton of business and the brand damage they’ve suffered is beyond that even. Maybe Unity will stick around, but it’ll be the engine those ad filled mobile casino games use, good luck finding developers who’d be happy doing that for the rest of their life.
I think they're referencing the character letter he wrote for Danny Masterson, pleading for a reduced sentence. Pretty hypocritical... to say the least.
Crimes in the US often have a large range of possible sentences (15 years to life in Masterson's case). The court has to figure out where in that range the particular person they are dealing with should be sentence.
Part of that involves trying to figure out how much of a danger the person is to society, and an important input to that is character witnesses (both favorable and unfavorable).
If a friend of mine was convicted of a crime and asked me for a character letter, I would probably write one giving an honest and accurate report of what I personally knew of them.
I don't see how that would be hypocritical, even if the crime they had committed went directly against something I advocated. Everybody deserves a fair sentence, and if someone involved in the case thinks I have useful information that might help with that I'll give it.
I don't think the letter [1] [2] does any pleading. Did Ashton Kutcher claim that sexual abusers don't have a right to character letters; otherwise I don't think hypocritical is an accurate description.
He obviously didn't know his friend very well if he never noticed the drugs his friend had though in all of the time they spent together.
Saw a giant billboard with something along the lines of "Apple hosts child sex abuse imagery on iCloud. They are complicit."
Really wonder what groups are putting these up and where they're getting their funding. This was in California. It happens every few years, where organizations try to go after encryption or other privacies under the guise of public safety or "save the kids" type stuff, but I've never seen huge billboards like this before.
I find this stuff very alarming. The reporting in TFA about European politics (and the recent Heat Initiative pressure campaign here in the US) illustrate how much unaccountable dark money is flowing into these causes. I don’t think that there are huge pools of anonymous donor cash looking to influence child-safety campaigns for the sake of anyone caring about children, because that’s not typically how altruistic donors donate their money.
Instead I think it’s likely that some commercial interests see a lucrative financial opportunity in this private data (either selling AI-based scanning tools, or mining it directly as a service.) This data is currently locked up with big firms like Apple and Meta, who are (for various reasons) leaning towards encrypting it rather than exploiting its contents, and the way to solve this problem involves passing laws through naive legislatures who don’t understand what they’re doing. And frankly that possibility worries me much more than where I thought we were previously - which was just a boring dispute between government and tech firms.
I'm not in favor of public scaremongering like spreading half-truths about a random other company on a billboard, but I will say that perfect is the enemy of good. You can say "sort out your own back yard" about virtually anything.
If you believe that what they do is good, it doesn't matter so much if their own back yard is sorted out, it's still good. If you don't, then not, and it still doesn't matter what their own state of affairs looks like.
The Catholic Church has a long history of actively protecting child abusers, and it keeps happening. They then, as one of the richest organizations on earth, set up their organization to allow them to "bankruptcy" their way out ever having any consequences.
Couple that with the catholic church's long standing stance of "anything LGBT or adjacent is child abuse" and you have an organization who's stance on "stopping child abuse" is "we must criminalize anyone or thing that is LGBT, but abusing children is a-ok, and we must make child victims feel like they are the guilty party, and making them aware that telling anyone about the abuse might send them to the 'police' is absolutely something abusers use".
It is absolutely correct to call out the involvement of any such organization in any claimed "child abuse prevention" system, especially a system that has no path to stop actual predators and criminals and by design has no possible mechanism for checks or audits.
I won't even consider trusting the catholic church's involvement in child welfare until they: compensate every victim, publicly report every abuser they have protected and provide all documentation to police, and they send every single person involved in covering up and protecting these child abusers to the police (because jfc they are child abusers), and then we can start addressing the various "schools" for native children that were basically torture centers for children that abused, killed, and raped hundreds if not thousands.
Isn't this sort of a useless line of reasoning ultimately? I mean sure, blah blah everyone is aware of the history of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. But the same issue is just as, if not more, prevalent across public schools in the United States. Would the same argument seem as reasonable if it read "Maybe the federal/state government should sort out its own back yard before making demands"?
It depends. Are the state attempting to cover it up? Is it to the same extent as what has happened in the Catholic Church? Are they offering the protagonists protection and sanctuary? Either way, I’m sure we can all agree that the measures they’re promoting are unacceptable. My point though is that organisations, such as the Catholic Church, and organisations that purport to operate under their auspices, have no moral standing to make these demands of other entities. From where I’m standing, it looks as if they are pointing the finger of responsibility at big tech, instead of the organisation that is covering up child abuse.
The first thing that comes to mind is the conservative movements growing obsessions with pedophilia, real and imagined. It has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion.
Look, as a liberal-turned-conservative parent, many of us have simply had enough with the gaslighting.
For decades the lesson was "don't talk to strangers online," yet every kids' app has a social component that encourages their doing exactly that. The channels by which this could possibly be supervised are rendered deliberately opaque. No supervision is possible by MITM.
Then you get the influencer crowd. The kids flock to innocent unboxing videos on YouTube, because ooh shiny. Because there are no broadcast decency standards on the internet, they're free to follow it up with "hey kids now let's check out my animal dildo collection."
Then there's Discord, on which even the fucking FBI is putting out advisories about pedophiles grooming kids from Roblox. The feds are 3-5 years late to every party, so in time that problem is going to prove way worse than anybody realized.
It's not an "obsession with pedophilia;" the idea that there needs to be a culture of "child sexuality" at all is distasteful enough to elicit strong reactions. We don't encourage kids to smoke or get facial tattoos, but we're forced to support their decision to be castrated based on ideas put in their head by Tumblr and the virtual environments they take part in, grooming them in the very games they play. Fire up Splatoon 3 and see how many names and profile images have something to do with yaoi, yuri, gayness or countdowns to HRT. There are none to be found that have anything to do with heteronormative sex, and most games banned sprays depicting such years ago. To each their own, but saturating kids with this stuff explicitly teaches them that transgressive sexuality is how you fit in. It's not for everyone, so they end up miserable, castrated, sexually assaulted, and dragging everyone else down with them and killing themselves, their families or their classmates. Thanks, Big Tech.
It's a visceral hook (and an appealing one) because it appeals to collective frustration. Everything parents try to do gets undermined by Big Tech. They do nothing to help us, and deride us for poor parenting where we fail to keep up with their tactics.
I'm just one guy burdened with a day job, trying to fend off teams of experts who each spend 40+ hours a week inventing efficient ways to sap as much of my kids' attention as possible while replacing their values with ones more friendly to pedophiles and advertisers.
The whole thing can burn to the ground for all I care. It's an entirely emotional reaction on my part, and I'm not alone in feeling this way.
I know several people in transition (and post) and the one thing that stands out is how carefully it is done. You don't go to the doctor and order a sex change like it's a Big Mac. There's a whole support trajectory of psychological evaluation and support and transition is the last option. Of course they know gender dysphoria is often a temporary phase.
No kid will get "castrated" just to fit in. Actual gender change operations aren't even done until adulthood, only puberty blockers are sometimes used which are reversible. And only if the child's dysphoria is so extreme it really impacts their quality of life or endangers them (think self-harm). In this sense it's entirely "for the children".
Also 99% of trans people have no regrets. The system works. I think it's amazing that we live in a world where people can decide their own life and body. And I don't really get the whole hate against trans people. It's not like they're harming anyone.
> Actual gender change operations aren’t even done until adulthood
This seems to be false according to this article [1] which claims that “In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims.”
In Holland it's forbidden under 18, I don't know about the US. But 776 people is obviously not a lot on the population of the US. That's one in half a million. Don't forget a transgender transition isn't the only reason people have genital reassignment surgery. Some people are simply born intersex and have corrective surgery for this earlier. Dysphoria can be quoted as a reason there too, but there are also more pressing medical concerns.
You are talking about such a tiny number of people compared to the overall population that many of those individuals could be intersex or otherwise have health or genetic problems that led to procedures at such a young age.
In fact, it's kind of fucked up how the entire anti-trans movement completely pretends intersex people do not exist.
> And I don't really get the whole hate against trans people. It's not like they're harming anyone.
Tell that to all the lesbian women who've had their social and dating spaces overrun by men pretending to be women. Or to the female prisoners forced to share cells with such men. Or indeed to any woman who's had to deal with one of these men invading a female-only space for his own selfish delight.
> They're not men pretending to be women, they are women.
This reality-defying assertion always reminds me of the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. Their position is that even though the bread looks like bread, tastes like bread, behaves like bread, has all the properties of bread, and so on, it somehow is literally the body of Christ in substance.
Just like how these men are somehow literally women, according to acolytes of the transgender belief system.
Yeah there's a strong "castration" thing being pushed by right-wing media but it's not a thing. Kind of cool in a way to watch it spread like a virus across social media and general society though, but also a little horrifying.
Yeah and I think the whole "rise" in transgender cases is better explained by considering that it was a huge taboo until recently and there's now actual operations available and accessible (insurance) to people that weren't before
People forget also that the parents have the final say in these matters until the child matures. Nobody is coming to castrate your kids :P
Puberty blockers are not reversible. If used for more than a year or so, they significantly stunt brain development and greatly increase the odds of infertility and other future health problems.
Puberty blockers don't make you dumber, they could affect fertility sometimes but it's not a huge issue if the eventual goal is a transition anyway (which it must be for them to be given). As fully transitioned people can't conceive naturally. It's a good tradeoff.
Suicide here in Europe is not higher (in fact it's higher when not carried out die to dysphoria) but I can imagine that in strongly conservative areas bullying is very strong driving people over the edge :'(
Ok, so people have had "child sexuality" since forever. Every time some person is talking about a kid's boyfriend or girlfriend they're talking about child sexuality.
The only change is that now we recognize that bullying and abusing children because they're the "wrong" sexuality is wrong, and homophobes have decided that instead of doing it directly they're going to try the "sex is sin" path of abuse and then say that the only reason for a non-straight relationship is sex, and therefore is adults only.
The fact that you go on an uninformed transphobic rant tells me which camp you're in.
There are a number of objections to specific points in your comment, as well as your overall perspective, but I think the biggest one is that your kids don't need to be using YouTube, Discord, or other apps.
Maybe because the fact that a (presumably) healthy adult such as yourself chooses not to procreate because it "seems so difficult" indicates that there is something very sick about the society that we live in.
As a soon-to-be parent who is left-leaning but disturbed by what the so-called 'progressive' movement are pushing, I agree with you. It gives me immense concern, knowing what my child is likely to be exposed to online.
The only thing that gives me some peace of mind is seeing the growing backlash to all this nonsense. Seems to me that thrusting this crazy ideology onto kids, chopping body parts off teenagers, celebrating creepy pedophilic men if they happen to align with some bespoke 'gender identity', attacking free speech and attempting to ruin the lives of those who criticize this delusional denial of reality is most likely not a winning strategy after all.
I just hope this is all done away with before my kid is old enough to be affected by it.
The comment I responded to was specifically speculating about who was responsible for billboards they saw that relate to the topic of the article. Incidentally, the responses to my comment are indicative of exactly the kind of rhetoric I have seen many times coming from the right on this topic.
Let's stick with "real" for a moment. There is absolutely nothing about real pedophilia that makes it a far-right-only concern. In fact, with the left's concern about sexual abuse of women, they ought to also care about sexual abuse of minors.
You are asserting that people who are not far-right do not care about the abuse of minors, which is a nonsensical belief with no connection to reality and completely undermines whatever point you're trying to make.
But it is a good example of the over-the-top rhetoric being used around this exact issue.
"It [pedophilia] has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion."
I am claiming that pedophilia motivates many people, not just the far right. It is beyond me how you could misread that claim into something that would lead you to reply as you did.
[Edit: My use of "ought to" may be the problem. The left, based on their positions, should be emotionally, viscerally motivated to oppose pedophilia. If they aren't, then that is an inconsistency in their position. But I think that they (or at least many of them) are motivated. So, to sum up, I'm not sure why you singled out the far-right in your initial statement.]
Yes it's your use of ought to, and no there isn't an inconsistency.
Being "emotionally, viscerally" motivated, to the extent that it's very obvious, tends to make people do stupid and counterproductive things. You shouldn't be demanding that.
> I'm not sure why you singled out the far-right in your initial statement.
Because of their horrible politicized accusations that take attention away from the actual problems.
It's much easier to misinterpret your statement that the left ought to care about paedophilia as a claim they don't (even if that was not your intent) than it would have been for you to interpret the OP about "obsessions... real and imagined" as a claim that paedophilia in general is a far right only concern...
Particularly in the context
of the appeal of an ad dubiously associating a California tech co with paedophilia to people who believe stuff like Pizzagate and Q because they're inclined to suspect everybody they don't like is in league with the paedos
I have never met anyone on the left that isn't disgusted by the sexual abuse of minors. Just the perfectly rational acknowledgement that the sexual abuse of women is a more widespread problem.
Child sex abuse is more common that it ever should be, but it is not the epidemic of child abuse that the right characterizes it to be. Accusations of pedophilia are extremely commonplace on the right, even when there is absolutely no evidence, largely because it is the most horrifying thing you can accuse another person of doing, and because the moral panic you can instill in your supporters if you convince them is a highly effective political weapon.
If anything, the people who scream about pedophila the loudest are the ones showing their apathy towards actual real-world child sex abuse, because they are doing so in bad faith, not to protect actual children, but to score political points through slander. If anything that helps obfuscate and enable child abusers, since the focus is now on conspiracy theories and targeted defamation.
Pretty weird. I mean, I guess since SD cards can be used to host it, SanDisk is also complicit. And you can use the open Wi-Fi at the airport to send it, so JFK airport is complicit. Just how many entities are obligated to scan all bits for these illegal sequences of ones and zeroes?
Why not actually focus more effort on the twisted people who create the content by abusing minors and less on a global dragnet for all communications?
Absolutely.
We already know why the interest groups focus on the communications, instead of proven ways.
Because it is a false flag operation. The topic is used as a vehicle to undermine private encrypted communication.
The CIA's hacking tools were leaked in the Vault 7 leaks from WikiLeaks. They were fairly amateurish. The nearest component was some 0 days for smart tvs to turn them into wiretaps. It seems like the NSA really does get the focus for signals intelligence.
No, lol. They don't. Maybe Windows, because Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about privacy, but Apple doesn't mess around. And if there were backdoors in Linux, we'd definitely know about it, because people are actively looking for stuff like that.
This is just wrong. Apple's public position could differ from its actual one. And Hiding a backdoor (or hiding with the deniability of an innocent bug) in open source is possible. "we'd definitely know about it" is not how security works.
There have been exhaustive third party reviews of the Linux kernel, nothing is impossible, but a government backdoor would be extremely hard to hide from the level of scrutiny that codebase is put under.
I would certainly consider it unlikely enough that any suggestion to the contrary, without evidence, is just a conspiracy theory.
Spyware companies would be a good guess. There's a lot of money to be made in helping abusers spy on their partners and/or kids by installing malware on their devices, and of course there's a big enterprise/govt market for that as well whether your goal is to capture dissidents, bust internal unions, or do a little industrial espionage.
If I was Apple, I would be getting that torn down and suing immediately (or hiring their quasi-police force to tear it down with or without permission). I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service.
Just because Apple willingly avoids knowing what their users store on iCloud does not mean they are taking the active role of allowing illegal content to be stored.
There are lots of good reasons for Apple to avoid a defamation lawsuit about this.
(1) Streisand effect (mentioned by another commenter) - it would generate tons of free publicity for their opponents.
(2) Civil discovery - the defendant would get to demand access to Apple's internal e-mails about this issue in order to try to prove its case.
(3) Possibly losing - even though this feels obviously intended to make people believe false things about Apple, a court might accept that there is some interpretation of "allows" and "complicit" that are protected criticisms of the company under some jurisdiction's defamation standard.
> I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service.
Encrocrypt and Cyberbunker probably had terms saying not to do illegal things...
What matters is how they respond to problems as they are pointed out. If it would turn out that links to their hosting service keep popping up in child abuse cases, do they respond by deleting them piecemeal or do they put a system in place that tries to identify the content by fuzzy hash and flags it for proactive review? Do they actively cooperate with the countries' law enforcement where the picture got uploaded from? That sort of thing. That has infinitely more impact than "you wouldn't download a car" notices
I saw that and a car driving around with that on it in San Francisco and had the same thought. Who funds that and who is their real target audience? With the tech crowd you might need a bit more nuance.
If in doubt, look towards churches. They're always neck deep in anything involving sex or sexuality, mostly to distract from their own considerable issues.
It also allows you to stay unblocked the entire time you're waiting on these dependent PRs.
For "how they do it on github": the way we do it at Graphite (spoiler I work there), is that we make the unit of change a PR instead of a commit. ie. every PR has one small commit, and these get stacked on top of each other. The tool itself abstracts some of the complexity out of rebasing and managing all of these stacked PRs (which in the article are referred to as stacked diffs).
Does that make sense?