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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • The Nigerian understanding of religion is fascinating. They just take what they need from any place they want. In the western world most people stick with the faith they were born in, or maybe switch once or twice in their lifetime. In Nigeria it’s common to switch very frequently, always taking the parts they like best and leaving behind the rest.

    It’s a very open and interesting way to look at things, not so much tied to their own personal identity (“I am protestant, so I must hate catholics” as it used to be common in the west), but instead they build their own faith from all the best sources they can find.



  • Yeah, especially in peace time. When war heats up and resources get scarce, you use the cheapest thing that does the job. But in peace time you feed your military contractors to keep them happy and to keep them researching and developing so you don’t lose out on modern technology development.

    (For clarification, with “war time” I mean “being in a war that actually threatens the country”. The US hasn’t been in a war like that for a very long time. They’ve essentially being in “peace time” while having military training and testing facilities in the middle east.)





  • 10 years ago I got into RC planes for a summer, and me and the guy were talking about how ridiculous it is that the milirary is spending so much money on simple drones, when they could just strap some explosives on a cheap hobbyist RC plane/drone for a fraction of the price, and just create swarms of them.

    The technology had been widely available for some time already back then. Turns out, it was just lacking a war to do so.

    (Just to be clear, we were all anti-war in general, this was just idle speculatiok back then. But if our country was attacked at that time, I’m sure some of us would have ended in a newly created drone force like what happened in the Ukraine.)







  • It seems like you don’t have a very broad exposure to closed source development.

    Probably not. 15 years is not that long, what do I know, I’m just on senior expert level.

    Companies run skeleton crews on crap products that don’t make money. Stuff they give away for free or that’s only used by legacy customers. Stuff they can’t shutdown because of contracts or because it still making a bit of money.

    You might notice if you get escalated to development enough that it’s always like the same guy or two. It’s because they might only have a couple of guys working on it.

    This is where your lack of knowledge about products like that shines through. It’s common to only get the same guy or two, because that’s the people designated (or willing) to talk to customers.

    In real life, OpenSSL was run by a single person. That’s not a skeletton crew, that’s abandonment.

    From what you are writing you aren’t a programmer and you haven’t worked in a software corporation before, but instead just extrapolate from your experiences with customer support.




  • OSS on the other side has the downside of being free.

    That means it’s:

    • massively underfunded because nobody donates
    • no SLA-style contracts to hold anyone accountable
    • most of the time no 3rd party security audits because free software (especially libraries or system tools) don’t go through procurement and thus don’t require them
    • everyone expects that “someone” will have already reviewed it becouse the code is open and used by millions of projects, while in reality they are maintained by some solitary hero hacking away in his basement

    If stuff like OpenSSL was CSS, it would be at least a mid-sized company making lots of revenue (because it’s used everywhere, even small license fees would rack up lots of revenue), with dozens of specialists working there, and since it would go through procurement there would be SLAs and 3rd party security audits.

    But since it’s FOSS, nobody cares, nobody donates and it was a singular developer working at it until heartbleed. Then some of the large corporations which based their whole internet security on this singular dude’s work realized that more funding was necessary and now it is a company with multiple people working there.

    But there are hundreds of other similarly important FOSS projects that are still maintained by a solitary hero not even making minimum wage from it. Like as shown with the .xz near miss.

    Just imagine that: nobody in their right mind would run a random company’s web app with just one developer working in their spare time. That would be stupid to do, even though really nothing depends on that app.

    But most of our core infrastructure for FOSS OSes and internet security depends on hundreds of projects maintained by just a single person in their free time.