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Cake day: June 6th, 2025

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  • That’s a weird outlook. I would postulate that (pseudo-)anonymous passer-bys are collectively probably the most valuable contributors to open-source. That one random well-researched easily-reproducible obvious-in-hindsight issue or patch that makes you go wtf.

    Annoyance would come from people who would create a “community” construct in the first place, even if it didn’t exist or was needed, just to be a busyworking “member” of. And those types often wouldn’t mind identifying themselves, if not for everyone, for a host like GH.

    Recently, I’ve been frequenting an “anonymous” old platform or two which are nowhere near their peak, and have a very high ratio of pure drivel, just in hopes of running into the random anonymous passer-bys of old mentioned above. Passer-bys who would never come near the M$/AI ID-requiring enshitified GH of today. And what do you know! I’ve seen issues (mostly performance ones) show-cased related to a couple of tools I contribute to, that neither I nor the upstream developers knew about.

    Anyway, what I was actually hinting at is that online communication existed for a long time before ID-centric social media came into the scene. This even predates the web itself (newsgroups …), and it wasn’t exactly an unmanageable wild west. Most spaces in fact were much nicer than the ID-centric social media platforms of today.





  • f-droid represents a distro model with a trust model and certain requirements including build ones. Think of it as the Debian of Android.

    When f-droid support is mentioned, it’s not a question of mere APK availability. All APKs after all are available if you know where to look. And it just happens that f-droid compatible 3rd party repositories already exist without the strict requirements (e.g. IzzyOnDroid).

    Beyond warring against any kind of third party build (don’t let me get started on forks), Signal uses google services dependencies, so it’s not just about the source of the binary APK. Note that whether these dependencies are hard, or “just!” a default, is not that relevant in my books (this is an active point of contention across many many apps).

    This insistent attempt at defending this blessed supposedly secure messenger seems infinitely weirder than what any fanperson of any other app can muster! I put imaginary hypotheticals that don’t even understand the point of f-droid, like “it is perfectly capable of enshittification” into that bracket. The continuous attempt at painting a false binary of Signal and Telegram is even more pathetic.





  • They are certainly a member of the community.

    There is no “community”. The GPL itself was explicitly created for the freedom(s) of the individual. The faux-“community” is just an attempt to create an “identity” in hopes of encouraging people to contribute, or at least advocate. And many projects don’t even like being advocated for outside of potential contributor pools (a few hate any level of advocacy outright).

    Incidentally, liberally licensed software, on average, tend to value adoption at least as much as direct contribution, and thus would usually appreciate advocacy more.

    is a political decision

    Or a practical one, or …

    Everything can be argued to have a political aspect to it. But what people (often non-contributors) have in mind ignores many relevant technical/practical aspects that may play a role.

    that empowers corporations

    Open-source license choice is practically near the bottom of an endless list of things that actually empower corporations. Most of the empowerment comes from the inherent nature of the system, which is something software licenses, GPL included, don’t even pretend to try to fix.

    But that’s not why I asked.

    Do you know how many liberally licensed essential packages are installed in your system right now, and can you name them? From my experience, most of the people who quibble about this don’t and can’t.

    * Not that it matters, but I personally use AGPL or MPLv2 for my own stuff.



  • I didn’t. And I was specifically referring to the published “analysis”.

    How do we know the supposedly malicious content (which hasn’t provably affected a single person) a security company finds, didn’t originate from that same company?

    • Crates NO ONE uses or ever used.
    • “with over 7,000 all-time downloads” immediately mentioned to make it sound like the above is not the case.
    • Our “AI” found a malicious base64 (wow, very fancy)!
    • Muh supply chain!
    • bla bla China bla bla

    It all sounds like a joke, and a lazily written one at that (Edit for fairness: the ctor part was a nice touch tbf).

    And this is not limited to this analysis, or this company, or the Rust ecosystem. The era of CVE logos and all that theater can become rather tiring, and AI slop took the silliness to a whole other level. Or as our friend Daniel puts it, it’s a “Death by a thousand slops”.




  • I think it’s time for this instance to consider introducing a filter where users have to choose a language they know (any language), and then have to answer easy questions about it (in a specific way), before being able to post here.

    It can be limited to specific posts, to limit the false-negative filtering of genuine discourse.

    This should help with bots, or worse, actual humans who accepted being shaped into acting like ones. The line separating the two has become very thin anyway, given the prevalence of LLM use, both automatic AND manual.





  • Rust has features that are not directly related to memory safety, but introduce paradigmatic and ergonomic improvements that help writing correct logic more often. Features like sum types (powerful enums) and type classes (traits, how generics are implemented) quickly come to mind. Hygienic macros and procedural macros are also very powerful features.

    Sometimes the two aspects (language feature and memory safety) come together. For example, the Send and Sync traits is the part of the type system that contributes to implementing thread safety.

    So it’s not all just about (im)mutability, lifetimes, and the borrow checker, the directly relevant safety features.

    Also, the tooling and the ecosystem are factors the value of which can not be understated.