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There are legitimate, ethical ways to make money, and then not so ethical ones. It seems for tech companies, they often can’t find the ethical ways or they simply don’t produce enough money, and so they feel forced to act unethically.
The only reason they get away with it is… well everyone is doing it. It’s a culture problem, and it’s viral to the entire tech economy. Nobody cares about being scummy, doing things behind users backs, invading their privacy, employing dark patterns, or even leaking highly sensitive data.
You can absolutely run systemd-init without systemd-journald, and some distros do.
And, when they do, it’s because AI can write code. Take for example financial analysis. AI sucks ass at that, but it’s good at writing code. You’re using it to write code to do the analysis.
When you ask AI a math question, it’s not answering the question. It’s writing a program to answer the question. Because AI is basically only useful for writing code.
Everything is very unstable right now. This is still a very new tool and we’re very much experimenting on a product level.
Of course anyone can be individually racist. But institutionally, no. The American institutions and systems have always been white-focused, black people simply do not have the power to be institutionally racist.
I mean, has there ever been any anti-white law ever written in the US? No, because it’s not possible. The institution which makes, and enforces, the law is itself white.
Most distributions only use some of them, and the “some” set is different from distro to distro. Many distros swap parts out. And some distros only use systemd-resolved.
Systemd is, legitimately, well divided. Most of the complaints against systemd are from people who know basically nothing about systemd.
It’s a measuring and risk-aversion problem, not necessarily a legal problem.
When people say systemd they really mean systemd-init, which is one piece of software. Not systemd-resolved, which is another.
It's the same reason why Flock is so popular. It's just cameras, who cares right? Well Flock is popular for the organization, it's an accountability sink. The government can't just stand up a bunch of cameras, people will complain. Ahh, but Flock can. The entire economic value of Flock is purely the accountability laundering, the technology is just a footnote.
Really, many organizations in the US boil down to this. Producing value is hard, producing fake value is easy.
We can argue about whether AI is a net-good for society and if the ends justify the means, but I think it's clear that a lot of people who worked very hard are getting fucked over. Is that okay? Are we really fine with piloting the idea "if you're rich enough you can do anything"?
Because, the reality is that if you or I did this, as many have done before, we would be getting sued to oblivion. Assuming we don't straight-up go to jail. But then AI superscalers do the same thing, on the order of 10,000, and somehow nobody goes to jail. Is that really the kind of message we want to send?
They didn't, like, steal the books for ideological reasons or anything. They stole the books so they could then generate equivalents, so people will pay them instead of buy the original books. That's the entire value proposition of AI.
Historically this happened to basically all food. Meat was sold rotten, meat was pumped with water for volume, people lied about what meat they were selling, meat was glued together with other meat to create reconstituted cuts that were sold as whole, and on and on. We had exposes, The Jungle, and now that basically doesn't exist because of the FDA.
But, in countries without an FDA equivalent, you can imagine that food fraud runs wild. It ran wild in the US, too, and I think it's fair to say that the only thing limiting it isn't morals, it's the FDA and regulatory framework we've built.
That doesn’t mean that flock should just keep doing what they’re doing. Quite the contrary - flock should not exist. It is anti-American to its core, and there’s no salvaging it. Flock can only exist if it changes in every way possible.
Providing private mass-surveillance as a product for our government is, fundamentally, broken. It’s not a good idea, and no amount of twiddling will make it good. Similar to how running a hit-man business is fundamentally bad. Doesn’t matter how many background checks I do on the hitmen. Doesn’t matter if I extra triple check they’re only murdering bad people. The concept itself is immoral and deplorable.
React et al. won’t just be 10x slower, it will also use 5x the amount of code with 5x the complexity.
People are obsessed with web frameworks because it’s more fun to engineer frameworks than make products or ship applications. Applications are boooooring. But, most of the time, you’re just wasting your time with the framework.
Basically all Microsoft software is bad. It’s obtuse, slow, unintuitive garbage. But people get very used to it, and are fantastic at navigating around and getting their job done. I should hope so, they’ve had decades.
Which does matter, because if it sucks to be labor then people leave and you don’t have talent. We see this pretty clearly in the US. We have a lot of states where companies can pretty much do whatever they want with their labor.
And… well… how are those states doing economically? Not good. The big companies are in California and New York State. Inside those “laissez-faire” states the economy is weak, and in the few places it isn’t, it’s where the city itself leans a certain way.
Imagine how much harder it would be to be a successful entrepreneur if all the big boys could merge into mega monopolies and that’s your competition. Or if they could straight up lie in advertising. Or if they could threaten and blackmail you.
Just go vegan for a week or something and you’ve offset your AI water use for a few lifetimes.
If you eat meat, you’re producing more CO2 and using more water than 100 vegan vibe coders sitting around creating slop 24/7. It’s not on the same level.
The PHP runtime has had very little vulnerabilities. Much less than Node.
But 99% of web applications are forms and displaying stuff. All JS accomplished is making it look prettier and enhanced tracking.
I mean, Facebook, my bank, Amazon… these can all be created with no client side code. It would be a lot of refreshes, but it can be done.
Certain applications, like Wordpress, are notorious for vulnerabilities. But these happen at the application level. PHP, as a language, is memory safe and largely secure.
Think of it this way. V8 has had numerous RCE vulnerabilities in the runtime. But also, react router has had RCE vulnerabilities. But react router was due to poor application design, much like Wordpress, where actors could trigger arbitrary code on the backend from manipulating requests. That’s very similar to how most wordpresss vulnerabilities work.
Google not only benefits from scam ads, they innovated the entire scam ad economy. Prior to the proliferation of automated online ad services, ads on TV, print media et al were carefully reviewed. There were very little scams.
Naturally such a business has a scaling cap. Online websites would collaborate with advertisers directly, and there were little to no scams. Then Google and others entered the picture and innovated automatic ads with virtually no human verification. After that, we saw an entire online scam ad economy explode.
It’s not just that Google doesn’t care enough about scam ads. They created scam ads, it’s their bread and butter. Not just Google either, we see the same thing with meta on their platforms. The scams will not go away.
Yes I understand that Google says they care a lot about scams and that there are people there working on blocking scams. But those are words. We need to look at money.
There is a very simple way that Google can block basically all scam ads: review all ads manually before approval, and allow no dynamic changes. They won’t do this, because it would implode their business model.