I absolutely despise Firebase Firestore (the database technology that was "hacked"). It's like a clarion call for amateur developers, especially low rate/skill contractors who clearly picked it not as part of a considered tech stack, but merely as the simplest and most lax hammer out there. Clearly even DynamoDB with an API gateway is too scary for some professionals. It almost always interfaces directly with clients/the internet without sufficient security rules preventing access to private information (or entire database deletion), and no real forethought as to ongoing maintenance and technical debt.

A Firestore database facing the client directly on any serious project is a code smell in my opinion.

I think, for me, owning a printer is like owning a van. You're the only person your friends know who has one, so every time someone needs it you're the one they ask.

I've experienced this exact issue with the Google Play Store with some clients and it's just the worst. This kinda thing happens because Google is essentially half-arsing an Apple-style comprehensive review of apps. For context, Apple offers thorough reviews pointing to exactly how the app violates policy/was rejected, with mostly free one-on-one support with a genuine Apple engineer to discuss or review the validity of the report/how to fix it. They're restrictive as hell and occasionally make mistakes, but at the end of the road there is a real, extremely competent human able to dedicate time to assist you.

Google uses a mix of human and automated reviewers that are even more incompetent than Apple's frontline reviewers. They will reject your app for what often feels like arbitrary reasons, and you're lucky if their reason amounts to more than a single sentence. Unlike Apple, from that point you have few options. I have yet to find an official way to reach an actually useful human unless you happen to know someone in Google's Android/Developer Relations team.

I'm actually certain that the issues facing Nextcloud are not some malicious anti-competitive effort, but yet more sheer and utter incompetence from every enterprise/business facing aspect of Google.

Fifth, they could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods.

You have to be fucking kidding me.

Why is astroturf "woke"?

After a certain point, learning to code (in the context of application development) becomes less about the lines of code themselves and more about structure and design. In my experience, LLMs can spit out well formatted and reasonably functional short code snippets, with the caveate that it sometimes misunderstands you or if you're writing ui code, makes very strange decisions (since it has no special/visual reasoning).

Anyone a year or two of practice can write mostly clean code like an LLM. But most codebases are longer than 100 lines long, and your job is to structure that program and introduce patterns to make it maintainable. LLMs can't do that, and only you can (and you can't skip learning to code to just get on to architecture and patterns)

Bofa deez nuts

It's not impossible, just very labour intensive and difficult. Compiling an abstract, high level language into machine code is not a reversible process. Even though there are already automated tools to "decompile" machine code back to a high level language, there is still a huge amount of information loss as nearly everything that made the code readable in the first place was stripped away in compilation. Comments? Gone. Function names? Gone. Class names? Gone. Type information? Probably also gone.

Working through the decompiled code to bring it back into something readable (and thus something that can be worked with) is not something a lone "very smart person" can do in any reasonable time. It takes likely a team of smart people months of work (if not years) to understand the entire structure, as well as every function and piece of logic in the entire program. Once they've done that, they can't even use their work directly, since to publish reconstructed code is copyright infringement. Instead, they need to write extremely detailed documentation about every aspect of the program, to be handed to another, completely isolated person who will then write a new program based off the logic and APIs detailed in the documentation. Only at that point do they have a legally usable reverse engineered program that they can then distribute or modify as needed.

Doing this kind of reverse engineering takes a huge amount of effort and motivation, something that an app for 350 total sneakers is unlikely to warrant. AI can't do it either, because they are incapable of the kind of novel deductive reasoning required for the task. Also, the CarThing has actually always been "open-source", and people have already experimented with flashing custom firmware. You haven't heard about it because people quickly realised there was no point - the CarThing is too underpowered to do much beyond its original use.

The computer is probably locked down and all software/os provisioned by their IT department

Go to your local transfem meetup

Naming your chatbot Arya(n) is a red flag

Cool party, stand for a lot of good things, including sex workers. I think they're called "reason" now