I don't disagree with much of what you said BUT it stands to reason that it's already the case that companies could outsource. Instead, they've chosen to go through the complex process of bringing H1B visa workers to the US.

I know in my company (which has a huge office in India) that they find it harder to keep high-performing Indian workers over there than it is here. The high-performing ones switch companies frequently.

So I'm not sure what the calculus looks like but it might be the case that H1B > American > offshore Indian.

The catch 22 is this: If you don't maintain compatibility, you'll make it harder for customers using Microsoft formats to migrate. If you do maintain compatibility, then you reinforce MS formats as the de facto standards.

I'm sure they had this debate internally, and my guess is maintaining compatibility is the least-worst option.

There are a few problems with "just open source it" though. For instance, they could rely on other licensed software that they paid for, and you can't necessarily just transition that to being open source. For example, EA open-sourced Command and Conquer Generals ( https://github.com/electronica... ), but you can't really compile it without also obtaining other licensed software such as GameSpy.

These are my thoughts as well. With the advent of AI (for developers, for designers, for graphics artists), there's a strong chance that there could be a surplus of labor relative to demand, and they won't have much leverage. In fact, since all of the production of a video game is necessarily digital, these jobs could just be pushed overseas.

There's also a factor about competition: There have been a number of games over the past few years (Valheim, Vampire Survivors, Megabonk) made by just a few developers that have made tons of money. There's no guarantee that unionizing at AAA developers will result in actual increased financial success for those companies, and whatever union exists might be short-lived.

I just don't see this actually working out

Sorry, but two of the biggest stories in IT over the past few weeks are privilege escalations attacks within the Linux kernel such as Copy Fail and Dirty Frag. While it may be true that over the previous 25 years being open source has helped protect Linux, the surge in high quality AI analysis tools has HURT Linux in the past few months.

Open source != super secure, and the past few weeks have proven that.

Right now, I think it's fair to say that the weapons of offense are greater than the weapons of defense across all software vectors.

I think a few things are at play here: First, curl is an extremely solid project that's been around for decades and is pretty hardened at this point. And curl is itself a "small" project (in that it's a utility with a very focused use-case, as compared to an OS, or a SaaS platform, or hypervisor or software to control a self-driving car)

Second, Mythos (by his own admission) found 5 bugs. The fact that 3 of them were documented shortcomings doesn't negate away that it found them. One confirmed CVE was found, and will be fixed.

This wasn't AI slop generated nonsense; it produced a report where all 5 were found against one of the most hardened codebases on Earth. It's very likely that when this is run against biggest software that is less mature with a huge footprint, it will find more.

I don't want to be "angry old man yelling at clouds" BUT ebikes exist in various grey areas of the current laws. Most of the modern bikes are not electric bikes; they are electric motorcycles and they should be treated as such. Here in NJ, we've had a slew of fatal accidents involving teens because of these loopholes. Riding on sidewalks (like a bike) but going 20-30mph. Or riding in traffic alongside cars, but not following traffic laws. Or the fact that they're not wearing helmets.

If your vehicle can go a certain speed and you're riding in traffic along with cars, you're no longer a bike but a motorcycle. And that should require things like license plates, driver's licenses, insurance, etc. ALTERNATIVELY, the bikes need to operate as bikes with similar speeds, only move when pedaling, ride on the side of the road, etc.

But right now, these vehicles are essentially electric motorcycles but kids ride them anyway under the guise that they are bikes.

The article is all over the place with its analysis: On the one hand, it writes "The caveat is that password crackdowns do not lead to consistent growth, and they often infuriate subscribers". Then immediately follows up with "There’s typically one big wave of new users who were previously sharing an account before the streamer plateaus to its new normal. Netflix, for example, saw 9 million more subscribers after its first wave of password crackdowns in 2024".

9 million users might not be consistent on-going growth, but that represents 9 million new paying users. Do they stay users? If so, then 9M x $8 (or more) per month represents $72M per month, or $864M per year. Maybe that's a one-time bump in user counts, but that's a significant number.

I imagine that HBO looked at the results of Netflix and Disney+ password crackdowns and is seeing that it was successful in raising subscribers and revenue. "Infuriating users" isn't an important metric if those users were never going to pay anyway.

I agree. They should just own the fact that they 1) provide a valuable service in measuring people's credit scores and 2) they won't be liked for it. Especially by those who have bad credit scores.

If there are legitimate issues where people should actually have higher credit scores than they do, then that should be investigated and resolved. If people are just upset that they screwed up their credit scores and don't like the repercussions? I'm not sure there's much that can be done.

And I would go one step further: Whatever respect or luster games journalists once had, it's all gone and replaced by Twitch, Youtube, Steam Reviews, etc. Who needs a game journalism industry that exists in a perpetual conflict-of-interest grey zone with the industry they cover when you can get all of the info you'll ever need from actual people playing the game? And who would trust industry awards anyway?

Steam should just take 10 minutes and perform metrics on "Total Downloads", "Total Hours Played", "Total Concurrent Users" and "Average Review Score" and whammo, there are your annual game awards.

Those of us on the internet in the late 90's and early 2000's should all say an extra special prayer to YouTube for breaking up the tyranny of having to watch movie trailers using Quicktime. Huge files, long downloads and a clunky video player that constantly required updates. Thank you YouTube for putting an end to that nightmare.

The article (as far as I can tell) provides no breakdown on who is using BNPL. Nothing about age, gender, level of education, region, etc.

The quote about "using this for groceries" seems to come from self-reported surveys. (Whereas these companies should have exact insight into what the loans are actually financing, so there should be no reason for surveys). People might be self-reporting groceries because they don't want to admit using it to pay for inessential items.

I wonder if this is being driven by YOLO youthful idiocy, not realizing that these loans will have to be paid back OR they will suffer credit issues down the line when financing a house or car. But this article is extremely light on any type of useful details beyond that headline number of 91.5 million in the USA. That seems pretty insane as that is 1 in 4 people in the USA.

Right, that's the problem. I believe it takes more energy to heat a house from 30 to 70 degrees in the winter than it does to cool one from 85 to 70 in the summer. Obviously there are more variables at play.

Whether it's because of the CCP or just bad software development practices, TP-Link devices of all sorts have been riddled with tons of issues.

https://www.tomsguide.com/comp...

https://thehackernews.com/2025...

(This summary is from ChatGPT)
CVE202333538 – A command-injection vulnerability in models such as TL-WR940N V2/V4, TL-WR841N V8/V10, TL-WR740N V1/V2.
CVE20231389 – A command injection flaw in the Archer AX-21 model that has seen exploit attempts.
CVE202453375 – Authenticated remote-code-execution (RCE) vulnerability in the “HomeShield” feature of some Archer router series.
CVE20259377 – An OS command-injection vulnerability in models “Archer C7(EU) V2” and “TL-WR841N/ND(MS) V9” via the Parental Control page.
CVE202525427 – A stored XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerability in UPnP page of WR841N v14/v14.6/v14.8.
CVE20259961 – Authenticated RCE via CWMP binary, affecting AX10 & AX1500 series, exploitable only via MITM (Man-in-the-Middle).

At some point, it makes sense to ban these on the grounds that they pose a security risk regardless of whether that risk is from malicious intent or just terrible software engineering practices.

Goodhart's law states that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This leads us to the exact problem described above: A Rotten Tomatoes score can be useful for audiences determining whether to see a movie. Studios know this, and thus will juke the stats by whatever means necessary to increase that score, which means that the RT score is no longer useful.