Unfortunately this is the logical conclusion of letting Microsoft dominate desktop computing for a generation and investing too much in software that relies on proprietary data formats. There isn't much effective competition for many of the users who are still using a Windows desktop, because they're locked in by whatever Windows-only software they still rely on. Those who could jump ship to mobile devices, games consoles, Apple desktop or Linux probably already have.

Right now, AI detection bots misidentify English language text from neurodivergent people and people using English as a second language as AI. I suspect it's much worse in other languages -- too many Anglophones pretend that English is the only language worth supporting.

Look at the salaries for generally competent software developers of any experience level in the UK. Now look in the US. It's not hard to see why our industry lags in the UK.

Look at the tax system that applies to employees in the UK. The scale in effect has massive increases in marginal tax rates part way along the curve that mean it's not a progressive system, for no sensible reason. It's even worse if you have kids, when at some points on the curve a huge proportion of any pay rise never actually reaches you in practice, or in extreme cases you can even be worse off after a pay rise, because of the strange ways that various allowances work.

Now look at the massive increases in effective taxation that have been applied to founders and owner-operators of small businesses in recent years. We're talking about 10-20% more of your revenues getting eaten by taxes before you get to keep any profits. In many cases you can now give up all the security and benefits of full-time employment (which are much better in the UK than the US, remember) and potentially invest your own money into bootstrapping your business, but then even if it works out modestly successful you end up paying higher tax rates than someone else taking a salary. Again, not hard to see why we're lacking in entrepreneurs.

Look at the flexible workforce. Contractors and freelancers in the UK live under a perpetual sword of Damocles called IR35 that has all but killed off the real flexible labour market in recent years and means even "contractors" are really being treated as disguised employees by default and again would probably be better off taking a permanent salaried position to get the extra job security and benefits. And given the difference in salaries as mentioned above, obviously some of the good people are then going to take their skills elsewhere.

None of this is news but successive governments have just stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the problems affecting smaller businesses, not just in tech but across other industries from healthcare to logistics as well. It's like they haven't noticed that there are 1,000 SMEs for every enterprise giant and collectively the SMEs create more jobs, pay more taxes, make more useful products... And then someone in government acts all surprised that our tech industry is lagging. Well, duh.

In that case, they could indeed be walking on dangerous ground here if they haven't removed/replaced those parts of the code. Do you know what licence the Eclipse-derived code was used under? Someone mentioned AGPL above but Eclipse also has its own licence that isn't obviously compatible with the AGPL terms.

I did read what you actually wrote. Perhaps it doesn't come across the way you were hoping.

You appear to be insinuating some correlation between developers who choose to use safer languages and developers who have low skills and don't care about the quality of their work. Frankly, that looks like a straw man you've invented to try to create some controversy here, because IME conscientious developers tend to be the quickest and most enthusiastic adopters of safer tools. They'd probably still be safer than average developers using any other language, but they choose tools that make them even safer where they have that option.

No, it doesn't. You have misunderstood how these licences work.

Before you dig the hole any deeper, perhaps you would like to review what the relevant licences actually say? I linked to the GPL v2 in an earlier comment, but the provisions in other FOSS licences typically work on the same basis as well.

Then perhaps you would like to post a reply citing the specific wording from any of those licences and the contractual relationship you believe exists between the copyright holder and any licensee that would impose any obligations of the kind we're discussing on the copyright holder?

But the copyright holder isn't themselves subject to the kinds of terms we're talking about in a FOSS licence, because they don't require a licence to copy or distribute the content in the first place.

For example, GPLv2 says:

Obviously that doesn't apply to the copyright holder, who by definition does have the right to modify or distribute without needing the licence.

This is simply not how either copyright or contract law works in any jurisdiction with which I am familiar. You are exactly the hypothetical person in FOSS community I was describing.

Going after people who already have a freely licensed copy seems like a step too far. Stranger things have happened in the legal world of IP rights based on obscure technicalities or novel arguments, but it's clearly against the spirit and intent of the earlier licence.

In general, there wouldn't be anything that required the copyright owner themselves to continue providing access to the source code for those versions, though, because they can licence their works on whatever terms they want and aren't subject to any related restrictions themselves as the rights holder. Sometimes people in the FOSS community don't understand how copyright works and get on their high horses about rights they don't in fact have or obligations that others don't in fact have, and based on TFS it looks like there might be a bit of that going on here.

Do they own all of the copyright themselves? If they do then the licensing probably means nothing as they have no obligation to anyone. But if they're using code to which other parties hold the copyright, under one of the relevant FOSS licences, that is a completely different situation, legally speaking.

Reddit's usefulness and quality varies greatly depending on which subreddits you read. The main/default ones are crowded and mostly terrible. Some of the specialist ones are actually very good and have real experts contributing. I prefer not to look too closely myself, but I've certainly heard of other niche ones about controversial or just plain nasty subjects that I'm surprised are even legal and allowed to continue at all.

The problem is that without employing experts in each field to identify the best content and filter out the dross -- that is, manual intervention, which of course doesn't magically scale -- there's no way for general purpose unsupervised learning to train on the overall body of work selectively. Instead it's likely to end up learning to mimic the (probably very low) average quality of Reddit contributions, which is why I suspect this might be the example that shatters the current AI/ML/LLM illusion.

I wouldn't 100% bet on this, but I wonder if Reddit will be the needle that pierces the AI/ML/LLM hype bubble. It could become a perfect demonstration that fundamentally the results produced by these models can only be as good as the data they were trained on. Garbage in, garbage out, but more realistically if you feed them large volumes of mediocre data unsupervised then you'll get a mediocre answerbot in return. See also all the coding bots that can generate plausible code from a prompt: if you review that code the same way you would review code written by a human, it's often full of problems that juniors might have but seniors probably wouldn't.

People who are writing or drawing or coding just by mixing and matching material copied from online sources and phoning it in probably should be worried, because they probably are about to be automated out of a job. However I doubt people with the knowledge, skill and creativity to be significantly better than average will have much to fear from this kind of ML "competitor" for a long time. And that makes all these sky high valuations for companies that are driven by the current AI hype look very bubbly.

Rust will help to make your own code safer and more predictable. It obviously can't help with code someone else wrote in a different language. The benefit to using Rust is the former and it's still there regardless of the latter. I don't know how much clearer I can say this, and to be honest, I've been replying in good faith but at this point I think you're just trolling so I'll be leaving the discussion now.

Yes, you are. Obviously if you depend on code written by other people then you are trusting that their code is good and if it isn't then you might have a problem. This doesn't seem a particularly novel or interesting argument if we're discussing how to make sure your code is as good as possible and avoid your mistakes becoming serious problems in production.

That is far too general a statement. In some situations, C++ may be slightly faster if Rust is performing extra checks at runtime. In other situations, Rust may be slightly faster because its model means it doesn't need to allow for complications that C++ does.

Either way, the difference is unlikely to be significant in practice. Rust and C++ are in the same performance class and both will be significantly faster than many other popular languages that have relatively high overheads for their runtime engines and dynamic behaviours.