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Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source
- chrismorgan 5mo ago> I want to be fair to Cal.com here, because I don’t think they’re acting in bad faith. I just think the security argument is a convenient frame for decisions that are actually about something else. […] Framing a business decision as a security imperative does a disservice to the open-source ecosystem that helped Cal.com get to where they are. That sure sounds like bad faith to me.
- LoganDark 5mo agoBad faith requires you to intend it badly, though, not just for it to be bad.
- Gigachad 5mo agoThe above statement is claiming it likely is intended as something bad though. A convenient coverup.
- LoganDark 5mo agoCovering something up is not bad faith. PR firms do it all the time (though plenty more do things in bad faith too). If what you're covering up is an explicitly user-hostile decision then maybe that's bad faith if what you're trying to do is trick people. But if you're just lying for brownie points then that's not always bad faith, just dumb.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- pseudalopex 5mo agoHiding something to manipulate public perception is bad faith.
- saghm 5mo agoI don't agree with your definition here. Good faith means trying to be correct but potentially not being by accident. Intentionally lying is bad faith and by definition trying to trick people; you know the truth is one thing, but you're saying something else to try to get them to believe it.
- LoganDark 5mo agoWhat I'm saying is that even lying is only bad faith depending on the intent of the lie. That doesn't mean others can't be upset regardless of the lie's intent, but I wouldn't say all lies are bad faith.
- pseudalopex 5mo ago> I wouldn't say all lies are bad faith. No one said this.
- saghm 5mo agoI'm saying this: I don't think a lie can be in good faith by definition. Trying to make someone believe something you know isn't the truth is fundamentally bad faith.
- pseudalopex 5mo agoI thought you said Intentionally lying and bad faith is by definition trying to trick people. But you said Intentionally lying is bad faith and by definition trying to trick people. I thought your point was intent. Most people would not say to hide Jews from Nazis was bad faith I think.
- LoganDark 5mo ago> Most people would not say to hide Jews from Nazis was bad faith I think. That would be perfectly bad faith to the Nazis. There's no such factor as moral good or bad here; bad faith has more to do the intent you have towards each party. If the intent is to explicitly trick someone towards something you want or away from something you don't want, that is usually in bad faith. (There are some exceptions.) If the intent is just to explain something in a way others will understand, even if your explanation turns out to be (knowingly) inaccurate, that can sometimes be in good faith, though I wouldn't call it good practice.
- croes 5mo ago> dishonest or unacceptable behaviour: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bad-faith https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bad-fait... > I just think the security argument is a convenient frame for decisions that are actually about something else. That would mean they think it’s bad faith. Claiming to do something because of A but to really do it because of B is dishonest
- chrismorgan 5mo agoFraming a business decision as a security imperative sure sounds like intent to mislead to me.
- LoganDark 5mo agoMisdirection is normal business practice. For example, Quadpay/Zipco recently made a change where instead of appraising your credit independently for each of their plans, they calculate a total amount you're allowed to have in flight at any given time, and share that across everything. In their FAQ, there is an entry for "Is my purchasing power going down?" and the answer is some bullshit like "Your purchasing power is unified for a simpler and more streamlined experience bla bla" which doesn't actually answer the question. It's meant to defuse questioners without actually revealing that yes, total purchasing power did go down when they decreased the number of buckets that multiplied their appraisal. You're no longer allowed to pay a larger sum of money over a longer period of time - you get one amount that you're allowed over any term, and that amount of lower than what you could've been approved for before. Regardless of whether that's a good or bad decision (good for people with bad impulse control, for example), they are dishonest about it through lawyerspeak, which is the most standard business practice there is. You could argue that plenty of standard business practices are bad faith but I would say the capitalist idea of private corporations in the first place is bad faith.
- thedevilslawyer 5mo agoMisdirection is misleading, and bad faith.
- spockz 5mo agoHow far have we fallen to call misdirection a normal business practice. I agree that it is everywhere but it isn’t or at least shouldn’t be normal.
- Chaosvex 5mo agoPertinent comment from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801845
- dirkc 5mo agoThis rest of the article contrasts the with "I don’t think they’re acting in bad faith" This bit stands out to me: > You can’t take five years of community contributions, close the gate, and claim you’re grateful. I don’t think it works that way. I think it's safe to say that Sam is not impressed with the the Cal.com decision and the way they framed it.
- chrismorgan 5mo ago> Large parts of it are delivered straight into the user’s browser on every request: JavaScript, … Ooh, now I want to try convincing people to return from JS-heavy single-page apps to multi-page apps using normal HTML forms and minimal JS only to enhance what already works without it—in the name of security. (C’mon, let a bloke dream.)
- ironmagma 5mo agoThere are a lot of things to hate in the Web3 world. Lack of back button form resubmission or redirect loops is a strange thing to dislike though.
- kelsey98765431 5mo agoThe web has grown so hostile lately that javascript is honestly not safe or useful anymore. the only thing it's used for is serving ads and trackers and paywalls, if i can't read a website with no script enabled it's not meant for me and im just not reading it.
- bruce511 5mo agoI concur that most web sites could use less JavaScript. And a lot of (but not all) cosmetic uses for JavaScript can be done in CSS. Of course for web apps (as distinct from web sites) most of what we do would be impossible without JavaScript. Infinite scrolling, maps (moving and zooming), field validation on entry, asynchronous page updates, web sockets, all require JavaScript. Of course JavaScript is abused. But it's clearly safe and useful when used well.
- LoganDark 5mo agoThis article raises a lot of good points that strengthen the argument against keeping models away just because they're "too powerful". I remain disappointed to see AI corporations gloating about how powerful their private models are that they're not going to provide to anyone except a special whitelist. That's more likely to give attackers a way in without any possibility for defense, not the other way around.
- NitpickLawyer 5mo agoI think the "too powerful" is a convenient half-truth that also helps with marketing, and more importantly keeps the model from being distilled in the short term. They'll release it "to the masses" after KYC or after they already have the next gen for "trusted partners".
- LoganDark 5mo agoI feel bad for Anthropic because they thought Persona was an acceptable KYC provider. It probably was a genuine mistake. I might have to leave them over that, if they think it's fun to ask me to give Peter Thiel my ID to persist indefinitely on Persona's servers!!!
- dhruv3006 5mo ago> Open source creates a useful urgency: when your code is public, you assume it will be examined closely, so you invest earlier and more aggressively in finding and fixing issues before attackers do. This should be the mentality of every company doing open source.Great points made.
- Serhii-Set 5mo ago[dead]
- necovek 5mo agoThis should be a mentality of every company building products :)
- dhruv3006 5mo agoI guess open source makes you more accountable.
- graemep 5mo agoI sometimes explain open source to people as auditable software.
- tech_hutch 5mo agoThat's a good way to explain it.
- somewhatgoated 5mo agoAlso makes it harder to build a business around it. With that combination no wonder most successful companies are closed source.
- TeMPOraL 5mo agoIndeed. All software products you can get your hands on are open source - compiled code is only little more difficult to read than source code, but not that much if you learn how. Which is why ~all companies switches to offering software as a service, so this mindset doesn't apply :).
- jonahs197 5mo agoNever used it as it asks me to burn an email address to post.
- dspillett 5mo agoThanks for letting us know. We were all wondering.
- shevy-java 5mo ago"over a decade ago, the repository has been licensed under GPLv2. And that’s not changing" Well - people can continue the GPLv2 fork anyway. So ultimately what Cal.com would do here does not matter; that's the beauty of GPL in general. It is a strict licence. I think GPLv2 was the better decision for the Linux kernel than, say, BSD/MIT. > That code is exposed to constant scrutiny from attackers, defenders, researchers, cloud vendors, and maintainers across the globe. It is attacked relentlessly, but it is also hardened relentlessly. It is clear that there is a business decision with regards to Cal.com jumping away from discourse, but the claim that open source is automatically better than closed source, when it comes to security, is also strange. Remember xz utils backdoor? Now, people noticed this eventually. Ok. How many placed trojans exist that people are unaware about? Perhaps there are more sophisticated backdoors. Perhaps AI is also used to help disguise them. I don't think that merely because something is open source, means it is automatically good or better with regards to security. Can you trust software? In California there are recent censorship bills to restrict 3D printing further, allegedly to curb on plastic guns (but in reality sponsored by lobbyists from the industry). Can a 3D printer print out a 3D printer that is not restricted? Is the state sniffing after people via laws not also a restriction? I guess it is possible to ensure a clean open hardware and open software system acting in tandem. But you kind of have to show that this is the case. See this old discussion about Trust, on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1m4mwn/a_simple_way_of_defeating_the_compiler_backdoor/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1m4mwn/a_simpl...
- Chaosvex 5mo agoThat's quite the thread. It seems like a good chunk of posters didn't even begin to grasp the point.
- TeMPOraL 5mo agoWe're talking about SaaS businesses anyway. Open Source doesn't really matter there - you never actually know what's running on their servers.
- fsflover 5mo agoUnless this is AGPL.
- glerk 5mo agoI've started to opensource my side projects (as long as the code is in a state that I'm not too ashamed of). Seeing how easily I can reverse engineer binaries, clone various applications, and just generally build stuff from scratch with AI assistance, I think there is no moat in hiding your source code. If you can use my code to build something better than me, I wish you the best of luck!
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago[dead]
- ramon156 5mo agoInstead of Microsoft snooping my code, now everyone can!
- glerk 5mo agoI’d rather next models be trained on my code than all that slop that’s out there. Hell really is other people’s code.
- negura 5mo agotoo bad. i wish they would go closedsource so that maybe everyone would stop using it. it's dogshit for countless reasons. including: - refuses to even load on browser engines older than 2 years. for a webforum that's absolutely appaling. there's a barebones non-JS version. but it only loads for individual threads (not the forum homepage or anything else), so they must be linked to directly (e.g from a websearch engine) - every single page navigation triggers the circle animation which blocks the view for up to 3 seconds. how is this not an obvious regression on webforum software that has existed for decades? - various nonsensical functionality suggests an incoherent code base. like the input element for the searchbox disappearing if the browser window loses focus. if you switch tabs midway for whatever reason, you need to reopen the searchbox every time you get back. and you can't use an external editor to fill in the input. because as soon as you've focused the editor, the element that the editor hooked into no longer exists - search results are crammed in a narrow responsive list with 5 entries. you need to press 'More' to see the rest of the results as yet another responsive list. you never know how many results there are in total. only that there are more than ones that loaded so far - long threads are never rendered fully. only as incomplete chunks. so it doesn't work to set positional markers in the scroll buffer to jump back and forth. as soon as you scroll past the boundaries of the currently loaded chunk, the old content gets destroyed and replaced. it feels like having alzheimer's - you can reply to any specific post in a thread and there will be a visual indicator about which post you replied to. except if you reply to the most recent post in a thread. so someones who reads a post has no way of knowing in advance whether it is being addressed to the post just above it, or to the thread as a whole i hate discourse so much. i'll never understand why it got so much adoption by FOSS communities. it must be the virtue signalling
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoThese are various reasons why I also opted to not use it when it was finally time to retire vBulletin 3. We never did adopt vB 4 or 5, because while I'm sure the code was "better" from a software engineering perspective (using classes/OOP etc), it was also noticably slower, and the original developers had either been ousted or sold out. The original vB developers built Xenforo, which is still in the spirit of vB 3 but with some modern amenities like live updates and the like. I also found Discourse to be... challenging to self-host.
- cowsup 5mo agoGreat piece. I thought the same of Cal's announcement; it basically boiled down to "we're willing to shift our entire business to a security-through-obscurity approach." It won't be long until systems are sophisticated enough that they can target an application over the course of a weekend, and try thousands of exploits across each possible endpoint you offer, to see what happens, regardless of whether or not your source code is public. Anyone who's launched anything on the web -- anything at all -- and looked at the logs will see all sorts of endpoints being requested for /wp-admin/ or random WordPress plugins, even if their site has never, and will never, run WordPress. Imagine this at scale, with every possible attack method imaginable, blindly hitting everything on the web. That's where I think we're headed, and closed source won't fix that.
- drambledon 5mo agoTheir own software has become so bloated that now they're pivoting to bandwagon marketing. Soon some corporate enshittification platform will buy them.
- robinhood 5mo agoThanks for this great comment that adds tremendous value to the discussion.
- eaf7e281 5mo ago> If your code is open source, your security team can scan it, your contributors can scan it, and independent researchers can scan it too. Literally! If everyone can access the same system as Claude's Mythos, one solution is to have more people trying to identify your issue before the hackers have the chance to do it.
- K0IN 5mo agoDoes someone know which tools they are using for the multi day code ai code review?