CodeMage (u/CodeMage)

CodeMage commented on Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS github.com/microsoft/lite... · Posted by u/aktau

BrouteMinou · 4 days ago

Microsoft US a massive corporation with so many people, business units, departments.

A comment like yours is just like saying: "I know a buggy open-source software, why would I trust that other open-source project? The open-source community burned all possible goodwill".

CodeMage · 4 days ago

Except that a company, no matter how heterogenous, has an overarching organization, whereas the open-source community doesn't.

There is no CEO of open source, there are no open-source shareholders, there are no open-source quarterly earnings reports, there are no open-source P&G policies (with or without stack ranking), and so on.

CodeMage commented on Nano-vLLM: How a vLLM-style inference engine works neutree.ai/blog/nano-vllm... · Posted by u/yz-yu

jacquesm · 9 days ago

Funny, this reads even more AI written than the article itself.

CodeMage · 9 days ago

It does, but what does that say about the state of communication in our industry? I've seen a lot of writing that reads like an AI produced it in contexts where I could be pretty sure no AI was involved. We want to sound professional, so we sanitize how we write so much that it becomes... whatever this current situation is.

No offense intended to @yz-yu, by the way. I miss the times when more people wrote in an eccentric style -- like Steve Yegge -- but that doesn't detract from what you wrote.

CodeMage commented on Nano-vLLM: How a vLLM-style inference engine works neutree.ai/blog/nano-vllm... · Posted by u/yz-yu

_alternator_ · 9 days ago

Wait—do people here really think the em dash was nonexistent before LLMs? It’s widely used by people like me who care about writing style. The reason LLMs use it is because they reflect care and concern about writing style.

CodeMage · 9 days ago

Yeah, people do seem to think that em dashes are an indicator of GenAI. I have been accused of using AI to write my posts on a forum, precisely because of em dashes. That's how I found out about that particular sniff test people use.

Hasn't made me change the way I write, though. Especially because I never actually type an em dash character myself. Back when I started using computers, we only had ASCII, so I got used to writing with double dashes. Nowadays, a lot of software is smart enough to convert a double dash into an em dash. Discourse does that and that's how I ended up being accused of being an AI bot.

CodeMage commented on Disrupting the largest residential proxy network cloud.google.com/blog/top... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

progbits · 11 days ago

I'm surprised by the negative takes...

Yes, proxies are good. Ones which you pay for and which are running legitimately, with the knowledge (and compensation) of those who run them.

Malware in random apps running on your device without your knowledge is bad.

CodeMage · 11 days ago

Getting rid of malware is good. A private for-profit company exercising its power over the Internet, not so much. We should have appropriate organizations for this.

CodeMage commented on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes" shreevatsa.net/post/dougl... · Posted by u/speckx

incompatible · 19 days ago

That's something a bit odd about Douglas Adams's reply. Arthur Dent isn't heroic, but he's the hapless protagonist. The protagonist doesn't have to be a hero. I'm not sure in what way he has "non-heroic heroism".

CodeMage · 19 days ago

As GP pointed out, "hero" is a word with overloaded semantics. I think Adams was using different semantics for different occurrences of "hero" in that phrase. Arthur Dent has a "heroism", as in a kind of courage that people would want to emulate, without being "heroic", as in performing great sacrifices for a noble cause.

I also believe Adams was trying to point out, very gently, the same cultural difference I called out in the comment I replied to, i.e. that the American culture attaches certain expectations and connotations to the word "hero" not because they are intrinsic to it, but because of American bias.

CodeMage commented on We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports curl.se/.well-known/secur... · Posted by u/latexr

nmz · 20 days ago

I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating higher incentives until the task itself matches the level of work to be performed to achieve it until merged.

The project managers also get a cut of all merges, testers also must approve of the merge and that feature X is the one they want. So the project manager gets to work and improve/reject features, the user gets control over the features of the project they want and developers get to pick specific features they would like to work on (sort of). everybody gets what they want (sort of). All via attaching $ to the issues of the software, not the people.

CodeMage · 19 days ago

> I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created

It might be good to have such a system as an option, but I wouldn't want it to become an expectation. I've got a couple of side projects that are out on GitHub. They have open source licenses and anyone is welcome to fork them, send bug reports, or pull requests, but I don't want to have any obligation of supporting those projects.

CodeMage commented on Vibecoding #2 matklad.github.io/2026/01... · Posted by u/ibobev

giancarlostoro · 20 days ago

Every place where the marketing types are making us take on dev workloads has always deprioritized bugs. The only place I ever worked at where I felt like I could get things done, and done correctly, all the managers were former devs, including the director, and didn't waste any time taking crap from anyone if the dev needed time to make sure he got something done and done correctly. That didn't mean a license to waste time by any means, but it meant we knew we could get things done correctly. Some of our products were completely off the grid once published and might not see updates for months, years, or ever again.

CodeMage · 19 days ago

> Every place where the marketing types are making us take on dev workloads has always deprioritized bugs.

My point is that they will continue to do so no matter how easy it is to fix bugs. It's a people problem, not a tech problem.

CodeMage commented on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes" shreevatsa.net/post/dougl... · Posted by u/speckx

eikenberry · 19 days ago

One problem I have with this is that the word Hero has multiple meanings and I'm not sure we are talking of the same thing. Like which of these characters follow the classic Hero's Journey, which are just the leading characters in books, which are heroes to another character, which are labelled as a hero as pretext, which are anti-heros treated as heroes, etc. These are all very different things.

CodeMage · 19 days ago

One of my favorite details about Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is the name he chose for his main character: Hiro Protagonist. It's not just a lovely bit of wordplay, it immediately makes you think about whether the protagonist is a "hero" or not.

This overloaded meaning of the word "hero" is especially pertinent when discussing the differences between the interpretation of "hero" in US culture and other cultures. Outside overt dictatorships, the US is the only country I know of where people are taught that anyone who serves or served in the military is automatically a "hero", regardless of whether they've actually done anything that would normally be considered heroic.

CodeMage commented on Vibecoding #2 matklad.github.io/2026/01... · Posted by u/ibobev

giancarlostoro · 21 days ago

Is it FOMO if for $100 a month you can build things that takes months, and then refine them and polish them, test them, and have them more stable than most non-AI code has been for the last decade plus? I blame Marketing Driven development for why software has gone downhill. Look at Windows as a great example. "We can fix that later" is a lie, but not with a coding agent. You can fix it now.

CodeMage · 21 days ago

"We can fix it later" is not the staple of Marketing Driven Development. It's not why Windows has been getting more user-hostile and invasive, why its user experience has been getting worse and worse.

Enshittification is not primarily caused by "we can fix it later", because "we can fix it later" implies that there's something to fix. The changes we've seen in Windows and Google Search and many other products and services are there because that's what makes profit for Microsoft and Google and such, regardless of whether it's good for their users or not.

You won't fix that with AI. Hell, you couldn't even fix Windows with AI. Just because the company is making greedy, user-hostile decisions, it doesn't mean that their software is simple to develop. If you think Windows will somehow get better because of AI, then you're oversimplifying to an astonishing degree.

CodeMage commented on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis 404media.co/elite-the-pal... · Posted by u/fajmccain

ceejayoz · a month ago

> know where the name comes from

This is a wild point to me, yeah.

The Palantir is literally a cautionary tale on the risks of thinking you can use the enemy's tools without being corrupted by it.

CodeMage · a month ago

I've lost count of people who have read Tolkien's work and never dug deeper than "cool fantasy story" level. I was no different when I read the Lord of the Rings as a teenager. Unlike C. S. Lewis, Tolkien does not shove his message down your throat.