Slightly reminds me of how we used to use TINYINT in MySQL to store boolean flags (which can store a range from -128 to 127 or 0-255 if unsigned).
I'm the kind of nerd who secretly wished to store many such bools in one integer and use the bitwise operators to query them, but restrained myself from ever doing this, since if I managed to sneak that through code review, the number of curses of my name would no doubt become so large (and so loud) over time that it would affect my employability.
That’s ubiquitous in slightly lower level programming (pretty much every non-small C program probably does it in some way or other), but the problem with doing that in this database scenario is that you might run into atomicity issues.
To toggle a flag, you have to read the column, modify it, and write it back. If someone else does that to another flag at the same time, there’s a race that one of you might win, at the expense of the other flag’s new value.
Unless you employ a lock that would otherwise not be necessary.
I enjoyed that the Union Flag just gets its own 'preset' - the fact that it's still presiding over a large handful of others makes it a very efficient decision compared to trying to tease out all the necessary shapes to reconstruct it.
I'll admit, I was hoping for some geometric approximations for countries like Brazil, though.
This scheme is OK but not OK. You note the Brazil flag and that's a great example along with the likes of the UK and the US too.
The Brazilian flag is nominally "quite" simple: Green with a yellow/gold parallelogram/rhombus with a blue circle ... then there is the white band and stars. Absolute nightmare to classify.
I thought the UK flag was a bit of a challenge and I remember an art class 50 odd years ago, trying to paint the bloody thing. Little did I know at the time about how Aussies and Kiwi worriers and co would fare! Won't someone think of Hawaiians: their state flag is not something you depict for a quick laugh!
I suppose the US flag is arguably the hardest to depict: Those stars would take ages to draw/paint/dribble. I imagine kids get a box of stars to stick on their depictions in art classes in the US.
What's really hard, together with the quantity of them is that they're white! I haven't actually seen many star stickers used, but agree that's a great idea.
Often, when the Flag's depicted in kids' art, paints or paint pens are used, since 'negative space' stars would take forever to do with a blue marker or pencil but is quicker to paint on top of blue. And there's a great deal of artistic license used in terms of their size and color. Or on a small flag, just a lot of tiny white dots!
It’s been more than a decade when CNN was a respected institution. I agree it’s too late for the news media in general. Their incentives are unfortunately all lined up just like social media: pure ragebait is the fully optimized product. The only thing changing from now on is fine tweaks to get it slightly more… ragey.
I'd roughly agree they are, but they have clearly positioned themselves in the opposite way as the mainstream media - the rest compete for ad-supported clicks and views; those two are fully paywalled and at a price that deliberately drives away anyone below say, the 90th percentile by income or wealth.
That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles.
The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now.
In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.
I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.
Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
you are less likely to have the same vulnerabilities as everyone else though, so unless somebody is targeting you, those vulnerabilities might not matter all that much
I'm saying that every web property I've ever seen logs for is swept at least daily for /wp-admin/... and similar URLs. I've also seen WP instances left unpatched become completely taken over by spammers in a matter of days.
Any software package with an install base of 1, whether human coded or vibe coded, by junior engineers or by Fable, will not have an organized ecosystem of "webscale" exploiting, unless the property in question is of incredibly high value. In that event, dedicated black-hats and state actors will always be targeting it explicitly no matter what software it runs.
I mean... you can literally do that now. You can set up a loop to iteratively pentest, review and patch a codebase (with human supervision as you prefer) and it'll find and fix more vulnerabilities in a day than a pentest team used to find in a quarter, for a tiny fraction of the price.
This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.
Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.
How do you actually do that? Is it all running locally? Cloud agents? Would love to hear about this. I see these deep agent loops mostly just burning tokens, but when I guide the AI I get very good results, so I’m not sure where the disconnect lies.
I use Zed (https://zed.dev) as my agent harness and either the $20 ChatGPT sub + Sol for personal/independent projects or an enterprise Claude account for sponsored/paid work. From the stats for my current work I use about $400/mo in tokens and a lot of that is non-coding work like pruning JIRA, managing business documentation, making dashboards - so my true coding agent cost is significantly less.
It's pretty simple, you could probably set up something like that by:
Configure some kind of CLI tool to talk to your ticketing system and git repo so you can programmatically interact with them. If you don't have a ticketing system, instruct the agent to use local text or markdown files to track issues and progress.
Ideally, make your code runnable in a way the agent can use. For my webapps I build a test harness so that I can run all the endpoints and workflows via reproducible tests against an embedded database. This is easier than it sounds, e.g. there are libraries out there to embed PostgreSQL or SQLite into source code, you can set up a test harness so you can run unit tests, integration tests and workflow tests that use your real frontend, server and database.
Paste this comment thread into the agent prompt and tell it to run a similar loop on your code base: a session that searches for vulns and writes up a report, some way for a human to do a review pass on the report, a session that indexes the reviewed findings into tickets, and sessions that fix the fixable issues and submit patches to your repo. The next search session should first read all the open issues so it doesn't duplicate work of earlier sessions.
LESS IS MORE - avoid fancy agent tooling and skills, don't cargo cult from others, build your own tools as you find your own needs. If something can be automated, use the agent to write tools and tests for it, don't just keep prodding the agent to do it.
I used to ask this question back ~2015 - I was seeing companies with massive, clunky CMS installs just so their non-technical/less-technical staff could update their websites without filing tickets to IT/dev. It seemed to be more about those departments wanting autonomy and not having to wait weeks or months for internal IT/dev to make site updates. The consensus within one dev group was that the company would have been better served by hiring someone who knew HTML/CSS/Javascript to embed with the non-technical people and edit a straightforward frontend site for them.
> I was seeing companies with massive, clunky CMS installs just so their non-technical/less-technical staff could update their websites without filing tickets to IT/dev. It seemed to be more about those departments wanting autonomy and not having to wait weeks or months for internal IT/dev to make site updates.
I remember Facebook's corporate news sites [1] were running on WordPress.
In most web frameworks its not terribly hard to extern content (you probably do this already for translations) and just have a nice little yaml or json thats easily edited.
I haven't heard of anybody but Cloudflare using it though.
Name recognition still means a lot. WordPress is baked into most hosting platforms now so SMBs just reach for it. Most of them won't hear about this b.s. and honestly the platform can continue to run on momentum for years.
There's a whole ecosystem behind WordPress that, while it's a security nightmare, is also pretty damn useful. You can't vibe code that yet, you have to build it over years, if not decades.
> There's a whole ecosystem behind WordPress that, while it's a security nightmare, is also pretty damn useful. You can't vibe code that yet, you have to build it over years, if not decades.
To be fair, I think a lot of people would have far better user experiences if they asked Claude/ChatGPT/preferred AI to rip out nag screens that many of the plugins are riddled with.
That's probably the first step to them vibecoding their own sites, but most people would likely just want to stay on the WordPress sites they already have, because they don't want to spend time and effort getting up to speed with new UX, or worse, being their own website product manager if they have to vibecode something from scratch. (Until something catastrophically breaks and they need to do a new greenfield site, I guess.)
A lot of people know it, there are a huge number of existing installs that work well, the ecosystem is huge and not everyone wants to vibe code replacements.
It is very empowering for people with limited skills.
Gods, I worry this is going to be how people view relationships in the future.
It's not the code or product, but the user base and time with it. Google, meta, etc aren't successful because of their product. It's because of the momentum and product scale. You could make a new Instagram easily. You can't get the user base to switch easily.
The examples you gave though are about switching cost, and network effect, and defaults baked into browsers by paid placements (e.g. Firefox, Apple).
And I even get that large, complex WP-based sites at least seem to have a lot of inertia keeping them there.
I'm just saying that I'm shocked Wordpress is something that anyone thinks still has upward momentum left in it. I would expect that 50 competitors to WP would be expanding their abilities to replace it, replicating and improving all its features, adding import functionality to make that migration easy, and building their own in-house plugins that would probably work for 90% of deployments without the malware risks of the wider WP plugin world.
And yes, I get that WP is still Free Software, but in my career I've seen most businesses paying for all-inclusive "WP hosting" (including what I assume is most of the work, patching). So the competitors I'm speaking of would specifically be competing with WordPress.com SaaS, rather than the "idea" of WordPress (The software).
I guess there probably are that many alternatives, I'm just shocked the WP branding has been enough to keep it relevant despite its disadvantages, bad security reputation, and insecure architecture.
So would human downloads, too. Mass audiences do not buy apps. They sometimes buy in-app purchases after installing them, but in terms of games, it's mostly the 'casino games for children' genre that make 90% of that kind of revenue.
Also, all else being equal, earning potential of paid or subscription apps on Android is usually an order of magnitude less than on iOS, due to the self-selection effect of people who buy $1200 phones tend to have more disposable income than someone who buys the median Android phone which costs much less. So, trying to sell a paid casual game, especially on Android, is not going to pay the bills the way an ad-supported free app would. Sadly.
The bot farm is a profit center, not a cost center. A corrupt 'publisher' (someone who agrees to show ads on their site/in their app) is having the bots bring up their own site, view the ads and install OP's app, which takes, say, $3 from the advertiser and pays, say, $2 to the publisher.
I'm the kind of nerd who secretly wished to store many such bools in one integer and use the bitwise operators to query them, but restrained myself from ever doing this, since if I managed to sneak that through code review, the number of curses of my name would no doubt become so large (and so loud) over time that it would affect my employability.
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