What's the potential that this puts things on even shakier ground? I'm sure the fallout wont really effect their bottom line that much in the end, but if it did - wouldn't making the US Gov't their largest acct make them more susceptible to doing everything they said?

I'm guessing they probably would regardless of how this played out, though.

LinkedIn has a wild past. I'm surprised that it seems like no one remembers. Scanning users e-mail inboxes, creating fake users, etc.

It's all documented on Wikipedia too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn#Criticism_and_controv...

IBM has cut ~8,000 jobs in the past year or so.

Sounds like business as usual to me, with a little sensationalization.

I would assume one major thing here is that many orgs only need a small subset of functionality from what most products provide. Many times, that small subset of functionality is only "good enough" in and of itself, but the org is paying the premium for the entire suite of whatever it is. This makes realizing that an LLM can get them to MVP and beyond much easier.

Charging hundreds of thousands if not millions per year for very basic functionality is what is "killing" b2b SaaS.

There is also the benefit of being able to use a single database (and hence schema) across multiple "apps". In many cases the complexity arises from the fact that all these apps have their own databases.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but does anyone else still work in an environment where they have to do synchronous version control? It's a nightmare and I have yet to find a decent solution.

To give an idea, this is a proprietary system that is extendable via scripts, but all of the artifacts are exported via XML files where script source is escaped into one XML tag within the metadata. Same with presentation layers, the actual view XML is escaped into one line within one attribute of the metadata file. The "view" xml may be thousands of lines but it is escaped into a single like of the export file so any change at all just shows that line as being changed in a diff. Attempts at extracting that data and unescaping it even seem to present problems because when the XML is exported often times the attributes within the schema are exported in a different order, etc.

I recently took a job maintaining and extending the functionality of an enterprise Enterprise Asset Management product through its own scripting and xml-soup ecosystem. Since it is such a closed system with a much smaller dataset of documentation and examples, it has been great at using what it does know to help me navigate and understand the product as a whole, and how to think of things in regard to how this product works behind the scenes in the code I cannot see.

It doesn't write the code for me, but I talk to it like it is a personal technical consultant on this product and it has been very helpful.

As an aside, have you looked at Zulip?

I don't doubt that is certainly a motivator, but I also don't disagree that a formal study on the effects of flooding corn fields en-masse is in order.

If I put corn in a pond to hunt waterfowl, I go to jail.

If I put pond in the corn, I can charge $10k+/yr to hunt my personal duck park.

My son loves trains. There are a couple of state parks near me that have tracks running through them and I once tried to find something like this / flight tracker for trains and learned their security / obfuscation around that seems to be on the same level of submarines? Why?

The British rail system releases as open data(JSON over AMQP) all train movements down to indidvidual signal blocks You can view some of the the live maps here: https://www.opentraintimes.com/maps, but this is unique as far as I know.

I don't think it's really down to super-tight security as such, rather that there's no reason to release the data publically.

Ships and airplanes broadcast data because it's useful for collision avoidance and tracking. The international maritime and aerospace system is far too complicated and large that you could ever build a private network of every ship or plane operator sharing encrypted data, or that one company could set up receivers for the tracking data worldwide. A closed system wouldn't work.

Rail is both physically and legally a finite closed space. The network operator knows definitively where every train in their network is because they have sensors in the tracks. The network is responsible for preventing collisions, not the individual trains. They have contracts with every company which operates on their tracks and if these need their internal data they can get it. So there's simply no good reason why trains should be publically broadcasting their information, or why network operators would want to expose all their internal data.

And against the no positives there are negative sides - apart from a couple of famous cases I've not heard of it in Europe, but stealing from cargo trains seems to be big business in the US: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-17/los-ange...

In the UK the open tracking data also brought complaints from freight companies who feared competitors would use it to analyse their movements, figure out which traffic flows were the most profitable and use it for commercial advantage.

Probably because it's easier to rob a traveling train than a traveling ship.

Also, if you're a plane or a boat it's really important everyone knows where you are for general safety / rescue reasons. On a (consolidated and decently organised) railroad the railway operators can take care of all of that.

Meeting the misses on a MUD is a true OG internet love story. That's awesome.

I met my wife on IRC in the late 90s, but meeting on a MUD is a level above that and I bow to grandparent.