Good. Fantastic. Wunderbar. Magnifique. "Maybe", "might", and "possibly" are all words that should be banned from scientific papers in all sections except "Future Work", and even there the reviewers should be on their guard for authors trying to sneak them in.

I read way too many papers back when I was a researcher where the authors did not have the proper evidence for claims they made, and they fell back on bullshit weasel words like this. It does NOT show that you're humble or retrospective. It shows that you didn't do your job but you really want your pet theory (or more likely, theme of your next grant's research) to be true, so you're going to act like it is anyway but with a safety hatch if you get called out on it.

The real elephant in the room, that the scientific community still refuses to address except when they think they can work it into a grant, is the reproducibility crisis.

The problem is that to outsiders, the initial set of gatekeepers who arose naturally in the early community as "the people that knew what it was about" will themselves appear to be "the toxic assholes", so every community will naively eventually cut out its gatekeepers to be more inviting to newcomers.

Only to have the actual toxic assholes flood in, become the new gatekeepers, and dominate the discussion, and suddenly your Faces of Evil speedrunning Discord must have a stance on the war on Gaza and the US election because we clearly need to keep out the neo-Nazis according to our CoCs, right?

And no, I don't have an answer to this other than to largely disconnect from online platforms and start engaging in your local community. Something I myself am not guilty of doing.

We can quibble about whether a "hacktivist" group can even exist at all or if it's a convenient lie the Internet has collectively told itself to justify groups of thugs attacking the targets they don't like as "the good ones", but they fit the modern definition of a hacktivist group.

(I remember trying at the time of the incident and having less success than now.)

Thanks for sharing the direct link to that video. At the time of the initial outage, I only saw some assertion that they were 'a hacktivist group' on some article on Bleeping Computer, and at the same time the only reason they'd claimed for the DDoS was 'because we could'. Hacking something just because you can is, of course, not doing hacktivism.

If these people are sincere, they are idiots in their propaganda strategy and artless in their 'hacktivism'... but definitely hacktivists.

But tbh this seems too stupid and ill-directed to me to be anything other than a false flag operation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Either way, thanks for the additional context!

In retrospect, the fact that Intel and AMD's stock prices both closed slightly up when Microsoft announced the Snapdragon X on Windows 11 was a dead giveaway that the major players knew behind the scenes that it was being released seriously under baked.

The reason why the Automattic/WP Engine fight has become the tech industry's daily soap opera isn't because we're all passionate about website hosting solutions. It's because the ramifications for open source are dire.

This fight is essentially the legal version of the xz-utils supply chain attack. It's a shock to the system that rocks the fundamental assumptions of open source to its core, here, "you can build your product on top of open source and as long as you follow the license you agreed to, you'll be legally fine."

WordPress.org could self-implode tomorrow, and that doesn't matter in the slightest, because the good will of the legal community (if there is such a thing) that the open source community spent decades trying to build up is being destroyed by one unhinged man. Matt may have ended up doing to open source what Bill Gates wasn't able to do in decades at Microsoft.

There are very good overviews out there, one I linked to in the very beginning. This post is about something else entirely.

The motto of anyone under the age of 30 should be "fuck you, pay me", and I say that as a middle aged man with a Big Tech salary. It is precisely people like me that have the financial and career stability that we can (and should!) start contributing to open source projects out of a sense of civic responsibility, but that is because we are already in a position to do so.

This continuous obsession with making the younger generation "prove themselves" by "putting in their time" otherwise they're "entitled", only to keep yanking up the "make it" age, has damned multiple generations at this point. We need to re-normalize 22 year olds buying their first home with their first baby on the way, NOT the 27-year-old working yet another unpaid internship while making his open source contribution to your open source project in a frantic attempt to get noticed.

The "fuck you, pay me" thing feels like a very American mindset though. Over here in Europe we're more of a mind that you do your civic stuff first and delay the boring money-making until you have to, I think. Because we don't really have to hustle for retirement stability. A 22yo having to work their butt off to buy a home (we rent here ...) instead of going after their passions strikes me as sad. Different systems.

This is what happens in the real world when you're a stuck up prig, not the Hollywood movie ending you've constructed in your head.

Speaking as a "security person", I passionately despise people like this because they make my life so much more difficult by poisoning the well. There are times in security where you need to drop the hammer, but it's precisely because of these situations that you need to build up the overall good will with your team of working with them. When you tell your team "this needs to be done immediately, and it's blocking", you need to have built up enough trust that they realize you're not throwing yet another TPS report at them, this time it's actually serious, and they do it immediately, as opposed to fighting/escalating.

And yes, like the original poster, most of them think they're the main character in an suspense-thriller where they're The Only Thing Saving Humanity From Itself, when really they're the stuck-up side relief character in someone else's romcom, at best.

That's an interesting read of what I posted.

Glad to have been of service!

If the issue here was "just" training LLMs, like some AI bros want to deflect it to be, the conversation around this topic would be very different, and I would be enthusiastically defending the model trainers.

But that's not this conversation. These are companies that are trying to fold our permissively-license content into weights, close source it, and make themselves the only access point, all while pre-emptively perform regulatory capture with all the right DEI buzzwords so that the open source variants are sufficiently demonized as "alt-right" and "dangerous".

The thing that truly frightens me is that (even here on Hacker News) there is an increasing number of people that have fallen for the DEI FUD and are honestly cheering on the Sam Altmans of the world to control the flow of information.

Telling the judge "but I wasn't wearing my black hoodie while listening to K-pop while doing it!" is going to be about as effective as telling the judge the legal code can't be trusted because it's not backed by a CI/CD system adhering to Agile practices. (Which a non-trivial number of Hacker News posters probably think would work.)