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In my experience the code will, but by year 5 nobody is left who worked on it from inception, and by year 10 nobody knows anybody who did, and during that time it reaches a stage where nobody will ever feel any sense of ownership or care about the code in its entirety again.

I come into work and work on a 20 year old codebase every day, working on slowly modernizing it while preserving the good parts. In my experience, and I've been experimenting with both a lot, LLM-based tools are far worse at this than they are at starting new greenfield projects.

This conversation shows how diverse the field is!

When it comes to professional development, I've almost never worked on a codebase less than 10 years old, and it was always [either silently or overtly] understood that the software we are writing is a project that's going to effectively live forever. Or at least until the company is no longer recognizable from what it is today. It just seems wild and unbelievable to me, to go to work at a company and know that your code is going to be compiled, sent off to customers, and then nobody is ever going to touch it again. Where the product is so throwaway that you're going to work on it for about a year and then start another greenfield codebase. Yet there are companies that operate that way!


> (I never understood why).

I spent two years trying to get it out of a project that began long after Axios had become redundant but it's very hard to go back and challenge decisions like this because every business priority is aligned against this kind of work.

I expect libraries built on top of fetch will be the next to be compromised, because why would you use fetch without an arbitrary layer of syntactic sugar...


There was never the business value. But now remember this axios case and use it as ammo for the next issue. Just don’t abuse it

I would go JS/HTML5 and just do something really basic like memory card game so the programming will be very simple for you and the path to a playable prototype is very short, maybe not even 100 lines of code, nothing to set up, nothing to google. Once it's playable you can focus on polishing how it looks which will probably be more fun.

Would you use a js game engine or just vanilla js?

Just vanilla JS unless you've got prior experience because any engine you use is going to have a setup process and bootstrapping code and a learning curve for you that will eat into your time. Across the weekend you might only really have a few hours to dedicate to this project and to hold their attention.

Using the "memory" game as an example, do you want the problems you solve to be how to shuffle the cards in a random order, or do you want to be solving why the cards all positioned weirdly because PhaserJS defines an anchor "origin" point in objects and by default that's x 0.5 / y 0.5 which means 50% width / 50% height aka the center of the object so you need to either set their origin to x 0 / y 0 or factor that into their position by subtracting half their width and height, and their width and height has scaled and unscaled values too width vs displayWidth... and of course if you're using a group for the card's display objects, that class does not support setting the origin.


(nevermind that the scams are extraordinarily likely to come through Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon)

They don't want users to find out who's the real scammer.

The scams are likely to some from outside Play. In the US, these scams don't run because iPhone is the dominant platform and side loading in iOS is not possible. In the rest of world they are widespread.

"Likely"? Do you mean that based on actual data, or are you using it as a weasel word so you can present whatever convenient "facts" that benefit Google as truth?

I’m betting on the latter. No Kitboga video mentions custom Android apps. What actually appears on almost all videos are online ads/spam or fake celebrity accounts messaging random people on Facebook.

It's funny how you aggressively push solutions that ignore the most common scam vectors investigators encounter. Could it be a coincidence that your proposal conveniently places every aspect of people’s lives at the mercy of big businesses? Or that the scam vector you downplay, ads and social media, just happens to be cash cows for some of the richest companies in history?

We already have plenty of paid lobbyists cheering the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest. There's no need to do that dirty work for free. Weaponizing the elderly being scammed of their life savings while protecting those that benefit from it is beyond messed up.


My proposal? Who exactly do you think I am? lol

Outside Play, on YouTube or via Google Ads for many of them. Likewise for Meta ads.

The scams that are happening in the rest of world are calls posing as bank support about urgent security issues and telling people to install apps to protect their accounts.

All the scams are for apps that are already in the Play and App store.

Absolutely! Never had one problem with apps on FDroid. Not even when tbe Simple Mobile Tools suite was sold to a shady company without a heads up to its users. And that safety isn't an accident.

I don't disagree about that.

Ah, sorry there seem to be a lot of people that seem to think that side loading is an issue to anything other than Apple and Googles profit margins.

They let so much malware in their stores already.


In the USA they tell you to install AnyDesk and remote access your computer. Or they just ask for your password. Or forge a check.

Does not sound like an Android problem. Maybe ask Microsoft or Apple about that.

Sideloading is very possible on iOS and there's an entire subculture surrounding it.

Not widespread enough to be a viable grift target.

And how much grift happens through Android side loading? (BTW, I hate that weasel word used to vilify a perfectly reasonable activity.) Practically all grift on Android happens through apps on the Play Store. People who know how to 'side load' are also usually careful and smart enough to think about what they're putting in. That's not a useful target for grifts either.

As somebody put it, Google goes after others without cleaning their own house first. It's just abuse of power at this point.


Apparently it's widespread in Asia and South America.

Are Debian repos a viable grift target?

They absolutely are and that's why they're tightly curated by maintainers.

Exactly like... you guessed it... F-Droid. Not Google Play.

FDroid has 0.2% of app volume of Play Store.

Don't mistake obscurity for security. FDroid isn't the size to even be noticed by problems that Play Store and AppStore are dealing with.


F-Droid at least does a quick review to make sure there's nothing malicious in the app before adding it. Since we know Google does something similar and there is still malware on the Play Store one might reasonably conclude that Google doesn't actually care about malware.

Now, it might be a problem of vetting at scale or malware being really subtle, but if that's the case Google should focus on improving their process before locking down Android for "security".


This is exactly why I gave the example of Debian repos.

Which again work on a model of a single entity having all the curation power.

My point is that Google does not want to protect users by restricting "side loading". If they actually wanted that, they would remove all the malware in their store. They are just building higher walls in the walled garden to lock you in.

Right, but the Debian Developers don't prevent you from installing (installing, not "sideloading") other programs. If you want to install malware you're free to, but they don't distribute it.

What does that have to do with Android and iOS?

Free software protects from malware, not walled gardens.

If you don't want Play Store, don't use it?

"Google is slowly removing such option "for your safety", and "hackers" on this website really believe them.

You can still install any ROM you want. Not having Play Store has some downsides, but those trades offs should be familiar to a free software enthusiast.

You can only do this on a tiny number of devices supporting free drivers (and mainline kernel), otherwise you are tied to an ancient Linux kernel. I'm using Librem 5 btw and don't believe that Android, whose development completely depends on Google, is a viable long-term solution.

I bet there's a lot more consistency now that AI can factor in how things are being done and be guided on top of that too.

That won't hold much benefit as SOCAMM2 and LPCAMM2 get more popular.

I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.

The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?

You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;)

(If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)


This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there".

Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.


Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other?

I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.


I mean do you remember what p2p turned into for things like downloads? "Some_popular_thing.mov.exe"

They worked great when most actors were well behaved and got abandoned pretty quickly once that changed.


I'm not sure how that applies here? The argument is that a p2p network will be flooded with bots?

There's a p2p network I use today which doesn't have that problem, probably due to its small size. Meanwhile all the big platforms do — including this one!


Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.

It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...

Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.

(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)

The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.


> Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends.

It would cost tons man. You don't understand the scale these apps operate on at all. Meta has their own data center footprint that rivals AWS or any other cloud company and they had that before AI, and it's not just all to run ads on. On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.

Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them


> On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.

Maybe you missed my edit? I specifically said not a clone of the monopolies, but a competitor big enough to be a sustainable business. The economics of a monopolist's empire are irrelevant.

> Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them

There's so much wrong with this statement. First of all, I will never meet anywhere near a million people in my lifetime. A regular human being's real social connections won't be anywhere near that big.

But even if it is (or users want to discover/follow random people), it doesn't take a computer science genius to discover how to interoperate between social networking apps. Meta and Google would never do this, but that's because they're anti-competitive monopolists; if you're a startup trying to gain marketshare and win on your product's quality, interop with other networks is a no brainer. We probably don't even need regulation to require interop, as the market will see it as a useful thing to develop on its own.


> if you're a startup trying to gain marketshare and win on your product's quality, interop with other networks is a no brainer.

There are platforms that try this, like Bluesky but they are not really sustainable businesses


I feel like discord is kind of like this used correctly, but with the recent drama and such it feels terrible

Ramifications for these cases are going to be interesting since Meta, YouTube, and cultivating addiction are intrinsically linked with smartphone apps.

This is why I put up with NoScript, it's frustrating sometimes to determine what a site actually needs to function but many of them don't need anything at all or just their own domain.

Sure is lucky Denuvo is European /s

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