As a thought experiment, consider how much monetary loss and how much time wasted you would tolerate before "it's just money bro" starts wearing thin.
It's a company, not a person.
Readit Newsgpvos commented on Developer sentenced to prison for activating “kill switch” to avenge his firing arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/Volundr
Length of sentence aside, your notion of victimless crime is wild.
Mugging is “almost a victimless crime” by that standard.
And this was significantly more victim-ful than that.
A company losing money is way less bad than a mugging.
Why do you think he had admin access to Active Directory?
Regardless, it should be pretty obvious that if an attacker gains RCE, they can do a lot.
He could prevent logins of other people. That means a rather high level of access.
gpvos commented on The Article in the Most Languages en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wik... · Posted by u/vhcr
Didn't know that.
I was referring to translations, which while being silly seem not that much of an issue. After all he provided the content in multiple languages (I know, I know)
One incident like this is not a huge problem, but it sets a terrible precedent that could turn Wikipedia into the same sludge as the rest of the internet. Best to nip this kind of thing in the bud.
This reminds me of a company in town that was known for doing the precise thing of putting money into separate accounts, specifically, CDs. It was the type of service where 50% was paid up front, 25% at specified milestone, remaining 25% at completion. So the company would receive the 50% and place a large chunk of that into a CD. There were lots of reasons, but my favorite was the excuse of it covers when someone fails to pay the last 25%. These were the types of jobs that could easily last 6-12 months. Lots of people had mixed feelings about this, but at least it wasn't paying for office renovations or the owner's car payments, etc.
CD = Certificate of deposit, a bank account in the United States with a fixed maturity date. (I assume.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_deposit
gpvos commented on The /o in Ruby regex stands for "oh the humanity " jpcamara.com/2025/08/02/t... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
This is a footgun. A language should strive not to add footguns. Every footgun you provide, somebody is going to blow their foot off with it, so that's a high price. If your language is popular it might be a lot of somebodies.
The opposite behaviour (we have a constant regular expression, we re-use it often but the tooling doesn't realise and so it's created each time we mention it) is not a footgun, it results in poor performance, and so you might want (especially in some managed languages) to just magically optimise this case, but if not you won't cause mysterious bugs. An expert, asked "Why is this slow?" can just fix it - you have to supply basic tools for that, but this flag is not a sensible tool.
In the 1990s, with the processing power of the time, /o was a reasonable compromise. The language later evolved to do the smart thing you describe, but you can't just remove features. A warning would be in order though.
gpvos commented on The /o in Ruby regex stands for "oh the humanity " jpcamara.com/2025/08/02/t... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
“Compilation”, I think, is exactly right. This feature is less about interpolation than it is about compilation of a single regexp to be used many times. It’s just shrouded in confusing documentation that should say: “/o tells ruby to rewrite this code such that it refers to a new statically allocated regexp object.” And when you write it that way, you see how insane it is for a function call to be hoisted automatically like this, without an explicit, obvious, syntactic annotation.
The implications of "statically allocated" are less clear than if you'd just write "compiled only once".
gpvos commented on The /o in Ruby regex stands for "oh the humanity " jpcamara.com/2025/08/02/t... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
> I didn’t recognize /o. It didn’t seem critically important to lookup yet.
> With nothing else to investigate, I finally looked up the docs for what the /o regex modifier does.
I'll probably never understand this mode of thinkning. But then again, Ruby programmers are, after all, people who chose to write Ruby.
> /o is referred to as “Interpolation mode”, which sounded pretty harmless.
Really? Those words sound quite alarming to me, due to personal reminiscences of eval.
Also, this whole "/o" feaure seems insane. If I have an interpolation in my regex, obviously I have to re-interpolate it every time a new value is submitted, or I'd hit this very bug. And if the value is expected to the same every time, then I can just compile it once and save the result myself, right? In which case, I probably could even do without interpolation in the first place.
It's a feature dating from the 1990s, when Perl (and I guess Ruby?) didn't have a way for the user to store a compiled regex, and this was a useful shortcut for a very specific optimization, which Ruby documented badly. Perl (and I guess Ruby?) later evolved in a way that made /o unnecessary, but the (now mis)feature remained.
Note that vim is not POSIX-compliant, as it has no open mode.
Open mode is a kind of single-line visual mode. I actually used it quite a bit over a 1200-baud modem line.
gpvos commented on Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update 0x44.xyz/blog/web-request... · Posted by u/deryilz
I can’t help seeing ad blockers as fairless content consumption, like choosing to download films, musics and books without paying the creator and the distributor (VOD, MOD, concerts, libraries…). Sounds great for you but how would that work if everyone would do the same?
Although we all be happy to se more competition, using an ad blocker on Google sites (and G-add financed-sites) have no positive effect for the competitors.
Don’t take me wrong, I hate Ads and Google methods but we can’t all rob the same store and hope there will be infinite food on the shelves and that the next store will benefit from that.
I wouldn't mind if Google et al. went bankrupt. Only Youtube would be somewhat of a loss.