I wish I had the possibilities to learn and build on such a large scale when I started out. AI is a blessing and a curse I guess.

My own early projects were most definitely crap, and I made the exact same mistakes in the past. Honestly my first attempts were surely worse. But my projects were also tiny and incomplete, so I never published them.

However: What little parts I did publish as open-source or PRs were meticulously reviewed before ever hitting send, and I knew these inside and out and they were as good as I could make it.

Vibe-coded software is complete but never as good as you could make it, so the effort in reviewing it is mostly wasted.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm a bit tired of seeing student-level projects on HN / Github cosplaying as production ready software built by an experienced engineer. It used to be possible to distinguish these from the README or other cues, but nowadays they all look professional and are unintentionally polluting the software space when I'm actually looking for something.

Please understand that this is not specifically directed at you, it's pent up frustration from reading HN projects over the last months. Old guy yelling at clouds.

Since you asked: Not in a million years, no.

A bug of this type is either an honest typo or a sign that the author(s) don't take security seriously. Even if it were a typo, any serious author would've put a large FIXME right there when adding that line disabling verification. I know I would. In any case a huge red flag for a mitm tool.

Seeing that it's vibe coded leads me believe it's due to AI slop, not a simple typo from debugging.

At first they said it was "great". But it soon turned sour and resulted in "it seems like you spend too much time answering questions", and I should "focus" and "free up" that time to work on my assigned tasks.

Well, I don't answer anything anymore. In fact nobody does. It used to be that you got precise technical answers from someone directly working on the tool or problem you asked about. The previous CEO would sometime even answer themself. Not anymore.

Now people ask, but nobody answers. The rest has devolved into LinkedIn style self-promotions and announcements.

I followed development on Github and what I saw in terms of fixes and commits gave me pause. Not how I like my critical backup software written.

I now use restic and sleep much better.

Then don't use any uncommon tools, e.g. ones associated with 'hacking', or store any copyrighted files in their cloud.

If there's any issue or error with logins etc., don't retry too quickly or too often or that in itself will be suspicious. Wait a day between requests, and double-check everything before retrying. Do not retry from a different IP or worse a VPN, or that will also be suspicious.

That should just about cover the bases for most providers.

Yes, it's insane and obviously you still need a backup of all your stuff just in case.

Wow that is really scary. Never did I ever think someone would actually go through all my old comments, analyze them in detail and then judge me based on them (my real account, not this throwaway).

Yes I knew it would be theoretically possible, but you'd have to be a total stalker and real creep to actually do it. Now anyone with an LLM can just do it without a second thought.

And it'll only get worse from here on. I'm sure there is at least 1 comment somewhere on the internet by me where I wasn't too nice, or a like / upvote on a questionable opinion or something.

If it's in any way connectable to me future AI tech is going to find it. Probably even across accounts, matching writing styles and whatnot.

I seriously think I'm going to stop posting on the internet for good.

What does "chore" mean in this context? Is the license just leftover from some MS open source template? If so there is perhaps some leeway, and the author maybe just didn't realize he needed to use the original MIT license file including the notices and not just a template one grabbed from the internet.

Any other explanation for such a "relicensing" would be extremely worrisome.

But yes, many people are not complying with the license literally, and it's frustrating to see. I know it basically doesn't matter unless you go to court over it, but still it irks me and screams a sort of carelessness about the rules and social contract.

Sorry for criticising your reading comprehension, I did not mean it as a personal insult.

It's just that I see these types of responses so often, basically every time any licensing question comes up. Twice in this thread. And all that's required is to just read the very short and basic MIT license text itself, no lawyering required.

I can understand the native speaker part, but just know that I myself am not a native speaker either. But I understand that's a huge barrier.

But even native speakers on HN with serious software engineering jobs and skill don't understand it, or don't want to understand. I think it's a bit like when people see math proofs, they mentally just skip over it.

That's the part that continues to amaze me.

That way anyone touching the project can just add their own line on top.

Done.

EDIT: Example: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE

A more complicated way to do it is to add a folder that contains the original LICENSE file or files. Sometimes there is more than one license, or the license texts differ. In that case, you must preserve all the different variants, even if they all call themselves MIT.

Then, you can optionally add your additional own LICENSE file * only iff* it is compatible with all existing LICENSES. In the case of the MIT license, you may relicense, sublicense, or use a different license in addition, provided it is MIT-compatible. With e.g. GPL you can't. Note that you still have to preserve all the original LICENSE files in the repo.

Once you change the copyright line, you no longer include "the above copyright notice". At that point you're violating the license.

You are also not allowed to change the copyright notice or license text in any way (you may however add to the license, which is a loophole other licenses such as GPL fix.)

Substantial is subject to (legal) debate as the Oracle vs. MS case has shown. Whole functions or large parts of files however should always be considered substantial, as the software would otherwise not work.

I'm seriously flabbergasted at how bad reading comprehension seems to be among coders.

In those few weeks my main regrets were a) not having done many of the things on my bucket list, and b) not having children or not going to be live long enough to see them grow up.

I'm someone with recurring nightmare about career goals and such. However at that time, work only crossed my mind briefly and was easily dismissed.

Working with people that also care (and are empowered to do something about it) is the greatest thing. I've worked in several such teams over the years and it's absolutely awesome.

On the opposite side, working on a team that doesn't is the worst.

I've actually been reprimanded by middle managers for caring, because caring sometimes takes more time than planned, and an arbitrary internal deadline wasn't met. I've come to realize they do in fact care, just not about the software but only about their own promotion. And the core issue is that they don't actually know why their own deadlines and feature requirements exist, they just get them handed to them.

This is different when you work closer to and with a customer directly. They know exactly what's important and why they need X or Y. When someone actually has to deliver results and deal with the users, they are more invested in having a working system. Here, caring involves finding the "right" person (usually not the one in charge), talking to them and figuring out what they really need (not want) and how they're using the system.

In such a setting, caring and building stuff that truly works is also reflected in performance reviews as everyone including the customer is happy.

You really have to pick your battles. I've had to make some concessions myself: some stuff turns out to be more complicated or unclear than it is at first glance, and sometimes you really don't have and can't make time for it. And in really large companies, there are sometimes so many people involved that you often can't get the answers you need or access to the person you need. Or you end up at legal which is more often than not a dead end.

When I was in high school I read the docs, and learned C++ from books and MSDN. Granted my access to the internet was rather limited back then, but it also never crossed my mind to bother people for things I could easily lookup myself.

Growing up in a RTFM, "search the forum first before asking" environment is seen as toxic today, but it really helps keeping certain behavior in check thats a drag on society as a whole.

One of the best mentors/bosses I ever had never answered coding questions directly, but always in the form of a question so I could look it up and learn for myself.

I try to do the same with my junior devs today, unless there's time constraints or they're under stress, I try to let them figure out the final answer themselves.

Ha! Heard that one before. Company was sold. Founder got filthy rich, bean counters came in, you know the rest.

No judgement, but you might be missing something or doing something "wrong" without knowing it. Being ghosted absolutely everywhere sounds strange regardless of how the market is doing. CS as a field is not dead yet.

As for the field not caring about you: nobody owes you anything. That doesn't mean you should just roll over and give up. And it also doesn't mean you should take shit from abusive managers "working you to death". There are good people and companies out there, but you need to go out and find them. I work only 4 days a week, prioritize my family, and my employer accepts that.

Compared to so many other jobs CS is still a lot better than other options and will continue to be viable for a long time. You're absolutely not too late.

However I wasn't as fast as others as I didn't recognize any of the questions and had to work through them. Interviewers expect you to be fast, or at least compare you to people who seem faster. Doesn't matter who studied or not, or who will actually perform better on non-leetcode tasks.

Also having kids is a real issue, it absolutely crushes the amount of time you have to anything besides working.

In the few hobby subreddits that I frequented, non-mainstream opinions or new ideas were often drowned out by the hivemind and people with less experience or knowledge. In short, a real discussion rarely came up or was even possible.

And in the case of questions I realized that so many people have no clue but still feel compelled to answer.

I'll omit my rant on career advice subreddits here.

For my hobbies specifically, I've reverted back to forums. You can have a relaxed discussion over the span of weeks, and interesting threads might remain active for months. You can get to know the users by their signatures, and the average age of users is also higher. Some of the users might even be professionals instead of just hobbyists, where I feel that was rare on Reddit.

As a result, the site is now "welcoming" to new users asking low-quality questions, but actively hostile to what the answerers and mods would like. While they're the ones left to clean up the spam.

And when the low-effort questions are closed that then drives away the question askers too, because all the "nice" onboarding didn't tell them their question should actually be well-researched. Their expectations of getting help now clash with reality and they end up hating the experience.

But all this drives views and "questions" in the short-term and management is so clueless it's hopeless. See e.g. the recent mod strike due to the AI policy issues, where they initially wanted to prevent/ban mods from deleting low-quality AI content from serial ChatGPT spammers.

And still answering every xargs Stackoverflow question with "you should use GNU Parallel" instead of answering the question? That really gets old quickly when googling for xarg answers.

These are just some of the reasons I'll never use parallel. xargs is perfectly fine for most usecases, and it can do everything I need it to.

But SO (the company) wanted it to be more accessible, easier for newbies, "nicer", there was a huge uproar over them publicly blasting a moderator over a disagreement on a unilaterally imposed new code of conduct, and recently they even (again unilaterally) effectively reverted the ban on LLM-generated content. This has been going on for years, and moderators have less power than they ever had. Imho this whole thing started much earlier, I think it was 2017 when they tried the SO documentation project and let everyone keep their rep where I first thought they had jumped the shark.

The company has been on a bender for the last few years, and high-ish rep users like me just don't see the value in answering anymore. With recent blog posts it seems even more clear that they are on the direct path to enshittification, against their own actual users and moderators.

Recently it feels like all the actual professionals have left and what remains are "students" asking low effort questions in bad faith while an army of spambots tries to pounce on these.

While this means boosted engagement numbers short-term, it spells death of the site long-term. SO cannot survive on low quality spam, even if other sites (like Reddit) may be able to.