I wonder when the first AI-only discussion group will be created by an autonomous AI agent, and other agents invited to it, without any knowledge of it by their human operators?

(I seriously can't believe that I'm musing about this as a serious scenario. It sounds ridiculous, but it feels to me somewhat plausible.)

It's a starting point, but I certainly wouldn't say it's the best metaphor that there could be. The idea of subfolders just doesn't make sense in a filing cabinet analogy, because you have to consider paper size - any folder which could fit into another folder is not going to be able to contain your regularly sized documents.

That said, I can't think of a better metaphor.

It's a well-known truth in software development that programmers hate having to maintain code written by someone else. We see all the ways in which they wrote terrible code, that we obviously would never write. (In turn, the programmers after us will do the same thing to our code.)

Having to get into the mindset of the person writing the code is difficult and tiring, but it's necessary in order to realise why they wrote things the way they did - which in turn helps you understand the problems they were solving, and why the code they wrote actually isn't as terrible in context as it looked at first glance.

I think it makes sense that this would also apply to the use of generative AI when programming - reviewing the entire codebase after it's already been written is probably more error-prone and difficult than following along with each individual step that went into it, especially when you consider that there's no singular "mindset" you can really identify from AI-generated output. That code could have come from anywhere...

It's possible to tell from an rdap call that this isn't the case:

  Event:
    Action: registration
    Date: 1999-10-10T10:57:47Z
  Event:
    Action: expiration
    Date: 2028-10-10T10:57:47Z
  Event:
    Action: last changed
    Date: 2026-02-09T20:34:17Z

If it expired in 2025, then that expiration would have occurred in October.

That said, you are probably correct that it wasn't a hacker as such. GoDaddy was indeed offering it for sale in February, according to a Reddit thread from that month[0]. That makes me wonder why...

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/oldinternet/comments/1qy566h/is_zom...

Of course, many people who want to de-Google their phones won't want to do either. This is an attack on people who want to keep their lives separate from Google.

I hope GrapheneOS isn't completely banking on their partnership succeeding. If Motorola devices ever became the only devices that GrapheneOS works on, and it's being done with Motorola's blessing, then it could be more easily legislated out of existence.

Since then, I know that it's there and that it's more secure than Node in some applications, and I can see using it being a good option. But it sounds like it might be too little too late? Going by this article, at least.

Now, remembering the titles of these demos might be another matter, but there are people who might be able to help with that too. Do you remember some scenes/effects from the demos that you were interested in?

Since the bundle is a separate purchase option and not replacing the option to buy TTD on its own, it also allows people to easily find out what they're in for by providing a description of what OpenTTD is, as opposed to just buying TTD on its own.

If it's based on BitTorrent, then surely that means that anybody who has the content that you want to see (or who advertises that they have the content you want to see...) will be able to see your IP address? Like how the movie industry can catch people who are sharing movies on BitTorrent?

Obviously, an attacker wwould probably need to use a separate BitTorrent client to do this, because I'm sure the IP addresses won't be displayed in the app itself, but that seems like it could potentially be possible.

I really hope I'm wrong on this, because other than that seemingly-big privacy flaw, this seems pretty great otherwise.

In other words, the Microsoft Windows update process as applied to software development.

Honestly, I've seen projects that do this. In fact, a lot of projects that do this, at the compilation level.

It feels like a lot of the projects that I would want to use from git pull in their own dependencies via submodules when I compile them, even when I already have the development libraries needed to compile it. It's honestly kind of frustrating.

I mean, I get it - it makes it easier to compile for people who don't actually do things like that regularly. And yeah, I can see why that's a good thing. But at the very least, please give me an option to opt out and to use my own installed libraries.

(I didn't know about that either before now.)