No one was forced to use Internet Explorer, except when they wanted to browse the Internet after bundled IE with Windows and drove Netscape out of business.

No one was forced to install Windows, except when they wanted to use a PC and Microsoft was threatening PC OEMs that provided alternatives.

No one was forced to buy a telephone line from the Bell system, so long as they didn't mind not having a telephone in the United States.

No one was forced to lease an IBM punchcard tabulating machine, except when IBM held all the patents and refused to sell their equipment at reasonable prices.

No one was forced to buy oil from Standard, except when they wanted to heat their homes after SO bought up all the competition.

This story is about Google monopolizing the advertising industry, not search, you absolute bingus.

Ah, dear, sweet Panorama... gone before your time! In the garden of youth, you were known as TabCandy, and you were a delight upon mine eyes, and saviour of many a Mac user, whom you liberated from the depths of taskbarless window management ignorance, up, up, to the dizzy heights of spatial window management! How much duller and greyer the world has been since you last languidly cached all those many tab thumbnails in your round-corner'd groupings... Were it only possible to summon you forth once more, with Ctrl-Shift-T, as in the age of your glories!

But seriously, it was a casualty of its own implementation. It was an enormous memory sink written in jQuery, at a time when Firefox was haemorrhaging users to Chrome because of its performance. Many of the browser APIs it depended on were also purged.

Sure thing, AAANUS SNIFFER. It goes a little like this:

1. Step 1: Fire workers.
2. Step 2: Pay out wages of fired workers as executive bonuses.
3. Step 3: Tell remaining employees to make up for the lost productivity or they're fired too.
4. Step 4: Tell investors everything is going great!

Hope that cleared things up for you.

Rust is now 13 years old. When Linus first released the Linux kernel in 1991, the C programming language was 19 years old, and Unix V7 had only been out for 12 years.

There are more than a dozen kernels written entirely in Rust. The claim that Rust is immature is pure propaganda.

I'm not saying he must go; there are alternatives. More like he should be insulated from managerial decisions until he actually has the credentials and social skills that the job requires.

This is a cultural flaw that exists in pretty much every CS department, big and small. There is a default assumption among computer scientists that we do not need bureaucracy or HR. This comes from several sources: the hacker culture around MIT, CMU, and Berkeley was deeply entrenched in the hippie counter-culture of the 1970s; the general absence of women in the field (especially declining during the early decades of the open source movement) somewhat averts one of the most common categories of HR problems; and the paperwork required by external offices and departments tends to be a matter of "following instructions" in a very programming-like way, which goes miles to reinforcing the belief that bureaucracy is merely a kind of programming for non-programmers. (Relatedly, the US banned freelance programming contractors because it feared they would cheat on their taxes, because of a general paranoia about hackers finding loopholes. The actual data suggests programmers have an above-average rate of honesty and obedience when filing.)

So we pretty much universally skip over all the hard-earned lessons from other organizations about the value of managers as diplomats and intermediaries. Fred Brooks made this worse; the Mythical Man-Month demonstrates that traditional corporate structures are inefficient for programming, which we take as validation that we should not wear any yoke that chafes. But it doesn't do or say anything about the baby in that bathwater; it assumes that all programmers are perfectly rational agents with no interpersonal difficulties or competing agendas, working toward the same ends.

The reality is that humans, being humans, are always flawed people, and often need various forms of managing, whether it's encouragement, a sounding board, or policing. Without managers to act as referees, all large open source projects are basically voluntary treadmills: work until you burn out, but only when you feel like it. Some of these duties end up on the shoulders of founders and project leads, but since those people are just programmers themselves, they will invariably be mismatched to the job, and will themselves encounter burnout as they must struggle with the burdens of pretending to be extraverts for the good of the rest of the team.

I don't think codes of conduct are the answer, not really. A code of conduct cannot provide any of the positive benefits of management, nor can it respect the nuances of context. I admit that I think they are well-intentioned, but they're also a half-assed libertarian band-aid for a deep part of the human condition that requires real talent to treat properly.

Creating a toxic workplace tends to get people fired, yes. Next time post from your actual account, you paragon of bravery.

Classy conduct is reserved for classy opponents. Anyone in a de-facto managerial position needs to be capable of functioning as a diplomat. Ted T'so has been pretty fucking clear that he does not have the social skills that are required of someone with his clout. If he were a member of a traditional organization he would have been sent to HR by now.

As for the other developer, perhaps we are thinking of different people. Hector Martin, Asahi Linux project lead, stepped down this week, who actually did cite the "thin blue line" post, along with the general stress of dealing with user expectations. Asahi famously ships another Nvidia GPU driver, called Nova, which is specific to Macs and is written in Rust.

They actually quit over the same post, which was written not by an anonymous "someone else" but by Theodore T'so, a famously shitty person who is the poster child for community codes of conduct. The last Rust-in-Linux dev die-off was also caused by Ted T'so interrupting a live presentation so he could shout about how Rust was a religion and he didn't want to convert, as described in SodaStream's comment. He and his lackeys have, it seems, been repeating lies about Rust (unstable ABI, lack of committed devs) all because he was asked to document how his code works. The narrative he sells about Rust being a flavour-of-the-week thing that he'll personally be stuck maintaining is either delusional or an excuse to maintain his personal job security.

The "meritocracy" is functioning as designed: as a pipeline for enabling tyranny by early adopters.

Unfortunately it seems Linus likes Ted so much that only once the kernel team's name has truly been dragged through the mud will any punitive action be taken.

(Fun fact: deprecate and depreciate are different words.)

The abuse I had in mind was more like the automation of propaganda, SEO, and scamming. Getting an AI to spill censored information or parrot naughty words isn't really an accomplishment as there are plenty of other ways to accomplish these tasks with better results, no matter how much angst it causes for the gilded parasites of Wall Street.

Mea culpa. Yes. Fine tuning, not abliteration. Words.

Before this conversation gets too far into the weeds: the DeepSeek-R1 model itself is actually uncensored. The chatbot on their website has a separate guardrail filter that blocks sensitive discussions, which is why it starts talking but then get cuts off. LLM authors have known for a while that building in censorship using abliteration or another alteration technique damages a model's reasoning ability.

It is worth noting that if the DeepSeek official bot wasn't censored, the CCP would shut it down or block it in China. DeepSeek doesn't really have a choice in this matter, aside from leaving the country.

As open-source LLM enthusiasts are fond of saying, this perfectly illustrates why it's important for LLM weights to not be hidden behind closed doors. Enshittifying AI by putting it behind a paywall may comfort shareholders and convince them that they have a moat, but it does nothing to prevent abuse, since any LLM can be jailbroken with enough skill and patience. (OpenAI used to claim this as a reason for not releasing their models. A thousand shames upon them.)

Unfortunately the only way to actually stop abuse of LLMs is to time travel to 2019 and unalive thousands of machine learning researchers. Pandora's box is open.

(Note: Pandora's box was actually a jar.)

(Amendment: it is.)

Perhaps "berkcoin" was already taken.

I downloaded twitter when it was new. I didn't care about it, I had just heard about it, After a couple of weeks, I thought, "geesh. I got this thing, what am I gonna do with it?" So, I started posting about my lunch and stuff... then suddenly I noticed I had 27 followers. WTF? none of them were anyone I knew. Then, I was like, are peoples lives so empty that they are actually interested in what I had for lunch?

So, I stopped posting and forgot about it.

Since then I have learned that, yes, peoples lives are that empty.

I am not even interested in what I had for lunch. I mean, when hungry, eat, when tired, sleep.