The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.
Equating AI with Pac-Man isn't really the intellectual flex you probably think it is.
When I demoted my single Pentium 4 rig to workshop use
it noticeably raised winter temperature inside my
sealed 40ft High Cube shipping container machine shop.
It's not difficult to rack or shelve many computers near the ceiling or hang them off walls. I hang a 1U server off the wall of my office as one would a painting (and could cover it with a painting if I cared). Total cost is a couple of small lag hooks costing less than a dollar.
I don't do mini/tiny PCs for space reasons because there is more than enough unused space in most rooms to make that unnecessary, and for access a computer on the wall is hard to beat. Needing no desk my server doesn't clutter mine.
If I wanted mining rigs I could line walls with them high enough not to interfere with anything else with heating as a bonus.
Many couples don’t believe they can afford to start a family. As the cost of living continues to balloon, this affects a couple’s ability to raise children comfortably. For those contemplating whether to have children, the mere cost of child care, which is an average of $15,600 per year, provokes questions of whether it is even feasible.
This is not just future generation's problem. Catastrophic lack of affordability for housing, healthcare, and childcare results in fewer kids, this in turn means that in 20 years there will be less adults working and paying taxes, in turn bankrupting social nets. So today's childlessness crisis will translate to tomorrow destitute seniors crisis.
Except for that one time it was Lupus!
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).
That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.
That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.
Yaz
Look — I’m a developer. I get it. I’m personally all for having organizations do more to support the OSS they rely on. But the people in the C-suite are more worried about organizational reputation and losing money to lawsuits. If a piece of software they rely on has a known critical CVE that allows for remote code execution and someone breaks in and steals customer data — that software either needs to be fixed, or it needs to be scrapped. Those are the choices. Our customers in the EU are allowed to request SBOMs of everything we use and pass it through their own security validation software — and if they find sev critical CVEs in software we’re using there is going to be hell to pay. And the people in the C-suite can’t abide that level of risk.
Most software development companies (outside some of the biggest ones) don’t really have the kind of expertise in house to supply patches to something as complex as ffmpeg. But a company like Google has the staff with sufficient experience in this area that they could fork the project, fix the issues, and redistribute it as their own solution to the problem — and now Google is driving ffmpeg development. Organizations that need a security-guaranteed version will simply switch to Google’s version, which will likely slowly become incompatible with the original. They’ve done it before — Chrome was Google’s fork of WebKit, huge swaths of users flocked to Chrome, and now Google has over the years made enough changes that their patches often aren’t compatible with WebKit (and, of course, WebKit itself did similar when they forked KHTML).
Now forking like this is great for the community, but it can be tough on individual developers who see their work co-opted and then sidelined by massive corporations. And that’s really why the ffmpeg developers need to be very careful about ignoring CVEs like this. They do so at their own peril, as anyone can fork their code, fix the issues, and slowly make it incompatible with the original. And a big enough organization can ensure they’re fork becomes the new standard, leaving the original developers out in the cold.
Yaz
Politics is more important than code quality, and while it's a non-profit that doesn't make it unprofitable to senior leadership.
There is no incentive to improve Mozilla whose revenue is not tied to performance.
The earth is like a tiny grain of sand, only much, much heavier.
