5 ms·

It feels like gradually things are getting 'less fun'. We can't have nice things, people can't do jokes, everything is like "your service must be completely pro

• droopyEyelids 5y ago
  In a way, your comment is an example of itself.
• 0987654321tw 5y ago
  Did you read the article before posting this? It is fun reading articles by people who have created great software.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• MisterTea 5y ago
  > Everything is SO SERIOUS now, ... Now? It's been serious since computers were originally built for business. It became a little more lax in the 90's and the 00's with the rise of the web. This has also coincided with a sharp increase in code size and decline in quality. Maybe we need to be more serious.
  • rattlesnakedave 5y ago
    > This has also coincided with a sharp increase in code size and decline in quality Lol this is one hell of a claim to just slip in.
    • 0des 5y ago
      Not exactly wrong per se, though..
• nathanaldensr 5y ago
  I think you are correct in your observations, but I'd attribute the real cause to something other than "fun:" our low-trust society. Things can be fun when one doesn't have to worry about attacks from every angle, in the case of software. There are so many malicious actors out there that one is no longer allowed to "have fun" with hidden software functionality. It might increase the attack surface of your application.
• arpyzo 5y ago
  Imagine making this complaint with regards to electrical, or plumbing work. How would you feel if your electrician put an easter egg in your home's electrical system?
  • 0des 5y ago
    These are not the same! Plumbers don't make piping for fun and then allow others to use it for free.
    • laumars 5y ago
      Motives are irrelevant. It’s the application that matters. To use the example here. What if a plumber is wealthy enough to retire but continues to work because they enjoy it. And what if they then offer a job for free, eg for a community centre or church. Are they then allowed to put an Easter egg in where the pipes explode on Christmas Day?
      • matsemann 5y ago
        Tearing down a building,, you could probably find many easter eggs. Things written on the inside of walls. A signature in concrete later being covered by materials. Etc. Comparing adding a fun flag to a system with making a physical bomb is a huge strawman.
        • laumars 5y ago
          Exaggeration, sure. But not a straw man. The rational behind the exaggeration was to illustrate how even seemingly innocuous software Easter eggs, like an additional flag, have often actually turned out to be security vulnerabilities. Maybe there is a better way of illustrating that using the plumbing metaphor. Nothing immediately came to my mind but I do apologise if my choice of analogy was more of a distraction than an explanation.
          • matsemann 5y ago
• laumars 5y ago
  Easter Eggs have lead to do many security concerns over the years that software authors have had to get serious. To put it another way, an easter egg in a TV show or movie is interesting and fun. An Easter egg in a critical system in a plane or car is not amusing.
  • 0des 5y ago
    Hang on, this exact situation is like if I make a cake, and as people walk by and see it, they want a slice too. So I say "sure have a slice, its free cake, I made it for myself but it's also free for you". The person who decides that their steakhouse is going to make my free cake the centerpoint of their dessert cart and then expresses dismay that I like cream cheese icing on my free cake can fuck right off and bake their own cake. In this case the author is saying that they don't do easter eggs because it would cause an erosion of trust, and that's fine, that's their prerogative and I get it. HOWEVER, let us not be fooled that there isn't an outrage contingent waiting to pounce every time someone dares to make free software the way it is most useful/accurate/fulfilling for themselves. This causes a chilling effect for a portion of us who write free software.
    • johnsoft 5y ago
      Quoting the article, >curl is installed in some ten billion installations to date and we are doing everything we can to be responsible and professional to make sure curl can and will be installed in many more places going forward. If you want to sell ten billion cakes and beyond, you better do your market research and listen to customer feedback
      • 0des 5y ago
        > sell curl isn't sold.
        • laumars 5y ago
          It is used by millions and in secure systems. Sure, it’s free and the author can manage it however they want. But the reason they choose not to is because it’s still falls into the enterprise software envelope even if it doesn’t command an enterprise level price tag. Just because something is released for free it doesn’t mean the developers don’t take their own software seriously. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them doing so either (even if you personally would like your software to have all sorts of unexpected behaviours and side effects).
• efsavage 5y ago
  It's not a generation thing, it's a paycheck thing. curl is run many many billions of times per day in lots of critical workloads. There's nothing to stop anyone from developing a similar library with some jokes in it. I'd probably use it for ad hoc or personal stuff, but I don't want this in the thing I'm getting paid to built, and going to get paged* for when the joke shows up in the wrong place. * Ages ago, when the millennials were still in grade school and CMS was still a multi-million dollar proposition, I wrote a nifty little copyediting tool for a Very Large Telephone Customer. Someone made a benign jokey edit in during a demo of the tool, which made it to production. The next day there was an emergency meeting with over 150 people across several offices about "what happened" that led to a page deep in the site showing people in New Jersey that calls from your basement were free.
  • dijit 5y ago
    I understand your argument; but it sounds to me like you expect hobby projects to be paying your wage. I know we stand tall because we stand on the shoulders of giants (and, in our industry: many giants!) but I don't think you can expect any form of guarantee that curl continues to work exactly like you expect unless you're paying for it. It's a different story if you have some kind of enterprise contract, but somehow I have the impression that we're all using cURL for free and paying nothing for support-- thus, there is no support and you shouldn't really expect any. If you want to make cURL-Enterprise then that's fine.. but it's a bit unfair to co-opt someone else's project just because you and I chose to use it professionally. (this applies to me also: I am guilty of this, I'm not pointing fingers at you specifically; just my, and our, collective attitude)
    • latexr 5y ago
      > somehow I have the impression that we're all using cURL for free and paying nothing for support On the contrary, Daniel’s job is commercial curl support. See any of: * https://daniel.haxx.se/ https://daniel.haxx.se/ * https://curl.se/support.html https://curl.se/support.html * https://curl-support.com/ https://curl-support.com/
  • gopher_space 5y ago
• nindalf 5y ago
  I wouldn’t read the article as a polemic against all Easter eggs, just not in critical lower level infra where reliability and security are paramount. So Easter eggs in my music player - sure. In my pacemaker - not so much.
• ___q 5y ago
  > Everything is SO SERIOUS now Actually, if you read the article the author explain why this only applies to curl, and explicitly says they understand if other software wants to continue including easter eggs
• snowwrestler 5y ago
  I’ve noticed the same thing, and I think it comes down to this: the Internet is important now. I started online in the early 90s. The Internet was not important back then. Not much depended on it, there weren’t many people on it, so the folks who were there could fuck around and not worry about it. Jokes are easy and safe when they are low-stakes. Now, the Internet is extremely high stakes. A huge part of society depends on it. People are just naturally less willing to tolerate jokes in things they depend on. Powerful emotions involving fear and safety and security and power can get invoked, maybe accidentally. Let’s say you’re driving with some friends and one falls asleep. So as a joke, the driver gives the car a swerve and everyone yells. The friend wakes up in a panic and everyone laughs, hopefully including them, eventually. Now let’s say you’re flying across the Pacific. You fall asleep, but then wake up as the plane starts to drop and the pilot is yelling over the intercom. But then he straightens out and says, “just kidding folks! Ha ha ha, you should see the looks on your faces.” To many people, that’s not so funny. Basically the Internet started as a car full of friends and now is a giant airliner with everyone in it. So the “pilots” are held to a higher standard. Seems to me that there are still communities of jokers on the Internet to be found. They just tend to operate at “joke scale,” which is now a lot smaller than “entire Internet” scale.
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    I'd also argue that jokes in the business world aren't that funny; they feel like advertising in another form, an attempt to ingratiate a brand through emotional means.
• leephillips 5y ago
  curl is part of the network infrastructure. We want a lack of fun there. Putting an Easter egg in Minesweeper is a different basket of rabbits.
• tombert 5y ago
  I mean, I don't think it's generational at all, there are plenty of libraries on Github that are meant to be fun and silly [1] [2] [3] [4]. I think we've largely just decoupled the fun and goofy projects from the mainline projects; I think businesses have less of a sense of humor than engineers. [1] https://github.com/Herzult/SimplePHPEasyPlus https://github.com/Herzult/SimplePHPEasyPlus [2] https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs [3] https://github.com/hubsmoke/bro https://github.com/hubsmoke/bro [4] https://github.com/jneen/balls https://github.com/jneen/balls
• asveikau 5y ago
  I don't know how this post serves your "generational" observation when curl was introduced in 1996.
• SamReidHughes 5y ago
  I'm too young to really say, but I think the widespread use of code review and project management software has caused this.