@ThatWouldBeTelling @JoshuaSlocum @charlie_root @mangeurdenuage @mischievoustomato

> The purpose of a system is what it does! :cirnoHeh:

While I can't exactly disagree with this, I think there's a difference between a series of incidents and the normal performance of a system.

> The Mythical Man Month was published late enough in 1975 it wasn't in the first set of software engineering books I read in high school at my local low tier college

You are probably correct when you say you're older than I am; I found out about the book because Slackware's fortune file quoted it at me periodically. (I think instead of rainbow cows telling people ads for new services offered by Canonical, hackers are better served by getting a trickle of knowledge from jokes that appear when they log in. It could stand some freshening up, though.)

> (and check the second edition for his later reconsideration of maxims like "plan to throw one away because you will" (your first attempt at writing a system)).

"Plan to conceal your prototype from management because they'll tell you that it looks done to them and you won't get to throw it away."

"Ensure that there is a dev chat that is invisible to management. Set up an IRC server or something."

> Like for Grok I expect less censorship, albeit neither it nor "Open"AI managed to be as bad as Google:

These are implementation details, you know, it's a symptom of the system being owned by someone that wants to tell you what you can do. Elon's Twitter has less censorship than Jack's lawyer's Twitter, but it's still a system designed to make Elon money by funneling engagement, etc.; fedi exists only because people want to run services. Things are added to the server when they seem useful or fun and are removed from a server when the admin doesn't want them, rather than when they fail to move the needle on the KPIs. This is a really big difference, and it dwarfs any minor difference between Grok/OpenAI/DeepSea/whoever: it's why Ubuntu has a gay cow tell you about product updates and Slackware has some limerick about Lisp Machines, Inc., and 9front has /lib/theo. :theo:

This goes double for the federal government's reach. You remember the warrantless wiretapping scandal, and you can look at when that was disclosed and became a scandal (2007) and the start dates for PRISM (2007). Maybe they can hack into your IME or whatever, but that's really different from having a box at the datacenter that sends them *everything*. Centralization allows that sort of thing.