@gmail.com and @outlook.com are like 90% of the spam I receive. What’s missing is effective accountability for those two companies hosting persistent spam groups who operate for months unimpeded.
> There are tons of CAPTCHAs, and many of them are impossible to solve even with real chrome and no adblock extension
Do you have any other extensions installed or use a VPN? This is highly abnormal compared to most users’ experience but not uncommon if you’re using an IP range which is also a source of malicious traffic.
The underlying problem is that “everyone assumes you are a bot” because every site operator has seen a huge increase in bot activity over the last few years. The AI companies ignore previously industry norms about traffic and do things like use residential IP ranges to originate their traffic (one way “free” VPNs and certain browser extensions make money), which means the amount of traffic most sites see has considerably more than doubled while bringing in no more revenue, and abusive activity is way up, too, because it’s cheap to point LLMs at forms to spam or try to exploit vulnerabilities.
If you work in a field which matters, not trusting even “Frontier AI” is also known as “basic professional competence”. If you’re vibe-coding a marketing site nobody dies if you miss a mistake. The same is not true in healthcare or real engineering, and because AI systems can’t be held accountable you will be.
Right - it was always dangerous but people who figured they weren’t important enough to be attacked might find out that LLMs have shifted that cost in the wrong direction.
If you just meant apple-targeting developers, then yeah; you're right that those languages are in decline. But if you meant developers in general, I think you'd be surprised how many growth sectors are hiring C programmers. They're often not SaaS tech companies, but they are massive and many are growing. Hardware, industrial control systems, defense/aerospace ... there's a ton there, the spaces in which they hire just don't overlap a ton with the spaces frequented by hacker news. Also, a lot of them aren't US based companies.
I hope that changes over time, since I definitely agree that the downsides of C-family languages massively outweigh the downsides of competitor languages.
Which is why WG14 and WG21 caring about security would be quite relevant, but alas, priorities.
C could have gotten slices already in the 90's, the concept already existed in other languages, and even Dennis Ritchie made a fat pointer proposal into that sense.
The others, let see if anything related to profiles actually gets into C++29.
> It's like hiding the kitchen knives because they might be misused.
I used to agree with this more strongly but over time decided the Django model was actually more effective as your cue to ask whether you should have been writing a Python function instead and calling it (which has been super easy since something like 1.4 or so IIRC).
Unless you have a small, very diligent development team it always seemed to end up with people coming up with thickets of template logic which were harder to understand and test but because they’d grown so complex people would act like it’d be an excessive amount of work to switch. I had a few projects where I delivered order of magnitude performance improvements while replacing hundreds of lines of ugly code, especially since using Python directly made things like caching and more complex formatting much easier.
> over time decided the Django model was actually more effective as your cue to ask whether you should have been writing a Python function instead and calling it
I get the motivation, but is disallowing brackets and proper variables really the right way to do this? These make code clearer to read and reduce duplication more than they introduce complexity so this is going too far in my opinion and feels arbitrary.
Oh, believe me, I’ve been on both sides there. My observation was that over time the burden of maintenance and on-boarding new developers pushed me from wanting more flexibility to saying that the restriction was more valuable than I thought.
Using Django back in the 2000s it was easy to get in the hundreds of requests per second unless you were doing truly pathological things in templates or gnarly database queries, and we have far more cores now. Usually something that low either meant things like not caching database connections or complex logic in templates.
I would also note that there were things like the weird restrictions on fabric and clothing which make more sense when understood not as something an omniscient divine being cared about but rather as part of rabbinic politics where the central temple rabbis were saying that their political opponents in the villages dressed wrong. It’s very easy to imagine a trip through the desert being bad, losing people to lack of food or water, but then being magnified in the future to claim divine superiority or strengthen arguments that they had earned land occupied by someone else (similar to how American western settlement sometimes justified ignoring native claims by saying that the suffering and lives lost in some way meant the survives had earned the land they ended up on).
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