It was disappointing hearing someone tank their own prospect of career growth like that.

They're banking on you offering it because saying no would rule out any mysterious prospects they have to offer, but really they're looking for new leads and if it comes from a candidate then it's warmer. Just have to be polite when you give them vague info and say you're not able to share more than that.

The questioning very quickly veered away from technical stuff and into stuff like, "where do you stand spiritually?" and other questions probing into whatever bizarre cosmic insights I could pull out of my ass at the time. He was the really intense kind of boss who wants to make sure you know of it with the hard back/shoulder slaps and micromanagement, and I could see his office from the boardroom which basically had an array of monitors all wired up to CCTV so he could watch (and hear) people from the comfort of his desk.

If any of that wasn't a red flag, getting hired literally 5 minutes after leaving the office was probably the biggest. I lasted about 6 months and even trying to leave was an ordeal.

Why are the ethics of working with Yandex or Baidu any better or worse than the ethics of working with Google or Microsoft? Except that they're not western.

The logical answer is that a person like this wants a very strong firewall, so ethically impure bits don't cross into their LAN.

I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?

I don't think the value prop has changed at all there. One day the AI gravy train will stop and people who used AI to punch above their weight will no longer be able to debug the stuff they built unless they put in the hard work of learning the language.

Nothing to worry about with Go in that respect because of how much it's been designed to be simple. Even the annoying err/nil checks you need to do all the time are in service of that simplicity. It gets old fast but it leaves nothing to the imagination.

At some point you stop developing and start weighing up the requirement against your understanding of the system and the environment it works in.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but signed packages are still impractical in NPM which is why supply chain attacks still work by editing existing versions or pushing new point releases without a signature.

Or if you put all of the credentials in GitHub actions which is even more trivially exploitable through the actions marketplace because it is just git with a thin proxy, you have an even wider attack vector

(I'm not being stupid, even ten years ago there were arguments on HN about whether you should audit your dependencies)

I landed on the 'yes, you should know what code you are getting involved with' side.

NPM is the windows of package managers right now.

Using that same mechanism to pull in several GBs worth of extra data without any warning is sketchy. If this happened and did not respect any settings for running on a metered network then it is even worse.

Other applications where this entitlement is better understood usually have a mechanism to purge the space it uses. e.g. Docker will consume whatever space you give it but you have commands to purge that space or to limited how much it will consume if it goes through a VM.

I really don't know why anyone would try to defend a tech company on what is a table-stakes expectation for being a good actor in the ecosystem. It's really lowing the bar for the supplier's sake instead of keeping the bar high for the consumer.

As a counter point, Call of Duty (the game) was mocked for requiring a good 200+GB of disk space and the conspiracy was they did that to push other games out of your storage. The market response there is easy: don't buy COD and don't install it.

I don't think it's quite the same for a browser that abuses network effects to stay useful. In which case Chrome is to Google what IE6 was to MS. A separate topic but we know that not all browsers are considered equal on the web.

Chrome is not entitled to my disk space just because I installed it and Microsoft has been excoriated for the exact same behaviour with AI.

You could just as well say "Sir, this is a Wendy's. To shreds you say? Don't call me Shirley" and the model would ignore it

The fact that you use a protocol to define it is beside the point. You still have to define what a Tangled record is, and the interface that accepts it, and the mechanism to resolve it on the client.

How else do you define what a 'tangled' is even if the underlying structure is git.

If I could get the same bells and whistles by wiring up another forge, so long as it offered a decent API and/or sent events over a webhook, I'd have everything self-hosted.

The agents would need to expose an interface on their own end but as long as you implemented it with a plugin, it'd take the dependency of GitHub and you could use MCP or skills for the rest of it.

Flamewars these days are just created by shit-stirrers in another country who are just pumping out rage bait from an massive array of smartphones. It's not even an impassioned flamewar, it simply exists to aggravate.

Using AI to forcefully disengage by simply suppressing that content would be nice and also have the secondary effect of depriving various internet resources of ad revenue.

Reminds me of poker.

Also I miss the excitement of a new issue of a magazine with a demo disc of a few new games.

Are we going to learn that physics no longer exists?