Actively drags down the morale and productivity of their team (because everyone is getting flooded with AI slop PR's)

AND costs far too much money relative to everyone else doing actual work? (token usage)

By god they sound like management material

Once you learn how to spot their misaligned panels it becomes impossible not to

Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games

And yet. Steam persists

Even as someone who enjoys "retro tech" far more than anything modern anymore, I'm hardly going to berate people to bend over backwards to keep supporting my ancient systems with modern software.

If someone wants to backport newer software as a hobby (such as Cameron Kaiser with TenFourFox, and the many downstream derivatives that spawned over the years) it's a welcome delight. But it should never be an "obligation"

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I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.

Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).

I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.

I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.

In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.

Well... Tridge and #Claude, it seems: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345...

The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly unlike the person I met back in the day.

I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:

If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.

That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.

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If peop- THIEEEVES can just download old games forever, how will these companies make money by selling new games? Or reselling the old games in their half-baked emulation offerings!

Truly the author behind this software deserves a special place in hell for creating such an evil!

(Obligatory reminder the above is to be taken as hyperbolic sarcasm. The very idea that someone would jump to defend corporations against software designed for cultural preservation is saddening)

Since then I've had no less than thirty five recruiters contact me for a systems engineering role at Kuiper.

Even though I'd "only" be a yellow badge (contractor) every time I've hit the Amazon hiring manager desk I get instantly vetoed.

Amazonians don't know (and I guess we can never know?) how long we're blacklisted for.

Eventually they're going to run out of people

You know full well what people mean when they say "Chrome"

Can only hope that Stop Killing Games is the first shell in winning back our digital rights

Everybody else could stand to take lessons from them

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927964

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

These were the same people that then went on to explain how they reverse-engineered the encryption keys of the PS3 to enable "fakesigned" code to be installed