speakingmoistly (u/speakingmoistly)

speakingmoistly commented on Open Source is one person opensourcesecurity.io/202... · Posted by u/LawnGnome

half way down the page:

> So now, let’s look at the number of maintainers for projects with over 1 million downloads this month.

Fair point, I glossed over that part a bit fast.

It does go in the direction I thought it would though. I'd be curious to see (or to take) a look a little deeper at what those thousand of packages are.

speakingmoistly commented on Open Source is one person opensourcesecurity.io/202... · Posted by u/LawnGnome

speakingmoistly · 4 days ago

[Relevant xkcd.](https://xkcd.com/2347/)

It's interesting to see the periodic rediscovery of "capitalism + technology relies on unpaid, voluntary labour", or as the author puts it, "Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars".

The one flaw that I see in the author's analysis though is that they don't seem to account for whether the packages accounted for by their source have dependents or monthly downloads. There's *a lot* of dead code out there. When excluding abandoned packages, I bet the picture is still grim, but it might be less so.

speakingmoistly commented on Moving away from US cloud services martijnhols.nl/blog/movin... · Posted by u/MartijnHols

1oooqooq · 6 months ago

it's well know. the most obvious public visible act was to reorganize their entire sigint depts to mimic the nsa, in the early 2000

speakingmoistly · 6 months ago

If very visible, then it must be rather simple to pick some sources to support this. Looking forward to reading what you have to share there.

speakingmoistly commented on Moving away from US cloud services martijnhols.nl/blog/movin... · Posted by u/MartijnHols

1oooqooq · 6 months ago

moving from a cloud in the US to one in NL is the most futile endeavor.

NL is the most complicity nation to both five eyes and economics agreements woth USA. there's a reason all eu offices from silicon valley companies are there.

speakingmoistly · 6 months ago

> NL is the most complicity nation to both five eyes and economics agreements woth USA. there's a reason all eu offices from silicon valley companies are there.

Citation needed.

In any case, I wouldn't call divesting from US tech infrastructure a futile endeavour: wouldn't a move to EU services (especially given that the author is based in the EU) allow benefitting from the EU's data protection / sovereignty legislation? That alone would be an net improvement over the laissez-faire approach that US has about people's data, aside from at least trying to go against the flow of technological centralization around the US.

Now, you can debate whether those protections are effective or not, but at least it's something to build from.

speakingmoistly commented on Sam Altman Interview: OpenAI CEO's Plans for ChatGPT, Fusion and Trump bloomberg.com/features/20... · Posted by u/neom

speakingmoistly · 8 months ago

Sans paywall: https://archive.is/GimSx

speakingmoistly commented on Mozilla begs courts to allow Google search deal for Firefox to continue osnews.com/... · Posted by u/pjmlp

jqpabc123 · 9 months ago

Google enticed them and Mozilla swallowed the bait --- hook, line and sinker. Now they are dangling like a fish at the end of Goggle's rod.

Brave is what Firefox could have and should have become. This would have actually served consumer interests --- something that Mozilla constantly talks about but never follows through.

speakingmoistly · 9 months ago

> Brave is what Firefox could have and should have become.

On the flipside, Brave went kinda weird with crypto and embedded it in the browser rather than having it be something you can tack on via extension if that's your jam.

They certain bring something interesting to the space, but hitching themselves to the cryptocurrency wagon lost some people (myself included) along the way.

speakingmoistly commented on One Man Deleted 11 Lines of Code from the Internet and Broke Apps nymag.com/intelligencer/2... · Posted by u/absqueued

speakingmoistly · 9 months ago

I'm glad to see this come back up (even though the title frames the issue entirely backwards: it's less about one guy breaking things and more about the malpractice of building systems that are brittle from day one) because I don't think folks have really learned from the perils of unnecessary yet load-bearing dependencies.

At the very least, I hope the conversation is still alive enough for groups to invest in mirror registries to have some form control over external dependency sources. At [previous gig], it's something that always felt like an expense that needs a lot of justification with the powers that be despite feeling like table stakes for keeping a revenue-generating app up in the long term.

speakingmoistly commented on Mozilla begs courts to allow Google search deal for Firefox to continue osnews.com/... · Posted by u/pjmlp

hawski · 9 months ago

Browsers are infrastructure. I wonder if their development should be financed like other infrastructure projects. Though I don't really know what I am talking about. Who pays for telecommunication cables on the ocean floor?

speakingmoistly · 9 months ago

> Who pays for telecommunication cables on the ocean floor?

TIL, it's a mix of private venture and public money [1], depending on which cables we're talking about. The ownership of those cables is also interesting [2] (granted, the source is a bit dated, but I can imagine that's still a trend):

> The leaders of today’s boom are two of the biggest generators of data traffic: Google and Facebook. Internet companies are behind about four-fifths of transatlantic cable investment planned for 2018-20, up from less than 20 percent in the three years through 2017, according to TeleGeography. Google has become “by far the biggest investor” in submarine cables, even taking full ownership of two of them—a reflection of the vast amounts of data the company transmits, says Mike Conradi, a lawyer at DLA Piper in London who’s been working on undersea fiber deals since 1999. Content companies “can make or break these cables.”

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable...

[2] https://archive.is/PcXvn

Edit: Formatting.