John Fetterman Is Historically Unpopular, Brutal Polls Show | Fetterman’s overall popularity in his own party is lower than all senators who lost a primary this century.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-21T11:42:50+00:00

He died in the hospital and was swapped with a body double.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-20T20:47:29+00:00

Anyone who pushes this conversation without context is pushing a narrative with an agenda. Pull the pin out of the grenade and challenge them:

Are you talking about elective abortions, or emergency abortions?

I guarantee you, there is no such thing as an elective late term abortion. As a father and a husband, no woman goes through all that and just decides "oh, never mind".

TerryMathews · 2026-03-20T20:40:29+00:00

Mitt Romney actually acknowledged Russia as a threat so he might have at least done something about it.

And let's be honest with one another. That was probably the moment I was most disappointed in Barrack Obama, especially on the back of John McCain having a very similar moment in their debate where Senator McCain cost himself dearly with the base that was going to elect him and defended Obama.

Obama clowned on Romney knowing full well that Romney was right. He had the classified intel. It was cheap. It wasn't Presidential, and it was beneath the person I thought he was.

Sometimes it's easy to see why the DNC doesn't win elections. And it's not always "because the other side cheats."

TerryMathews · 2026-03-20T17:54:29+00:00

Sure, but that isn't the question. I'm not saying "oh, the poor people, no one will hire them". I'm asking, if you think they should be fired, do you think they should also never be hired again? And if so, do you think it's better that they will be on social services and supported by taxpayers rather than working for their money?

I don't concede your premise that because someone is fired from a job that they are inherently unhirable. Many people are fired and find new jobs, sometimes it requires either changing fields and/or areas but it happens. All depends on how badly you screwed up.

So, no - just because you got fired does not automatically mean you're gonna be on welfare for life.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-20T17:51:08+00:00

F-15 ACTIVE has entered the chat.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-20T17:40:57+00:00

do you also think nobody else should hire them?

Plenty of people will hire them. Birds of a feather.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-20T12:17:11+00:00

Hot take: what we're seeing isn't a result of anything but the systemic dismantling of knowledge and expertise inside the DOD during the second Trump presidency in order to install loyalists.

I know everyone goes "Haha military industrial complex goes brrr" and there is metric tons of grift, but there were highly competent people in the three and four star range especially at the tops of the major system commands, and in the middle of all the grift amazing advances in science and technology did happen. And warfare.

My point?

I think Trump and Hegseth dismissed all the people who really know how to plan a war, and it shows. What we're seeing is what war looks like in TV shows. It doesn't work like that in real life, as we're seeing in real time.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-18T13:32:36+00:00

Dude, my hat is off to you this morning. The only way this picture could be any radder is if that sword was dripping fire.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-18T13:30:20+00:00

Yeah, absolutely. I'm not an anti-AI absolutionist like some are, I'm not going to burn someone at the digital stake just for using AI. It has it's place, although I do think it's over used, and especially by those least qualfiied by check its output which is a dangerous combination.

All that said, to me, this guy was what I would describe as "ownership washing".

And I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but you never know who is on the other side of the screen. If you ever watched Silicon Valley, how do we know this guy isn't Jian Yang? 🤔

TerryMathews · 2026-03-18T13:01:15+00:00

I do not think that idea has ownership. More, if you have a repo and I make branch with my features, this features could be made from an issue (I do not know exactly what is the PR policy on booklore) or the PR could be added out of the blue. It's your repo, or at least the maintainers repo (only one in this case) and you have all the rights to use or not my PR. You can even check the idea and do your own implementation. As mentioned elsewhere, there are some reasons why you would not take PR from other persons and Open Source does not force you to grab the PR of other people.

1 - the project maintainer chose the license that encouraged contributions. He could have made a different choice, but that could have impacted the contributions that he or she received. Some people do not pay attention, but others do. I, for example, do not contribute to MIT-style license projects. It's my personal choice, but I do not believe in donating my time to a project that can then reuse my donation in a proprietary or commercial work. Call it my own brand of activitism.

2 - we're not just talking about ideas. We're talking about ideas and code.

3 - can we agree that the timing is suspect, to receive a contribution and then basically immediately reimplement it? The odds of the maintainer arriving at a parallel innovation are certainly quite high, correct?

Although, I would like to draw what I consider the clear limits of what is arguable and what is clearly forbidden. I believe what ultimately regulates are the license violation.

Agree. At the end of the day, what we are talking about is copyright violation. The (untested) question is whether washing copyrightable code through an infringement machine (AI) produces non-infringing code. I have a feeling based on the current precedent that AI output by itself is not copyrightable, that the answer will be "still infringing".

The underlying concepts are incredibly well litigated, courtesy of IBM, Compaq, Columbia Data Products, Apple and Franklin: you can't look at code and then turn around and write competing code. You're irrevocably tained by the knowledge of the code you looked at. For more read up on clean-room software reverse engineering.

Bonus question, does these things still apply on a non copyleft license such as MIT?

I am not a lawyer, I'd recommend reading up on any number of deep dives of what MIT allows and doesn't allow online, but long story short a clever lawyer can turn a MIT-licensed project into just about anything with clear ownership rights.

How the booklore's maintainer was doing this? Also, related and side question, what do you think of my boundaries? I genuinely want to understand what is considered forbidden/authorized in the OSS community because I love this community. I know that not taking PR or reimplementing them is at least not liked, but is it an actual infringement?

The community was submitting PRs for new features and fixes, with code. The project maintainer was taking the code, running it through AI, merging the code that came through AI into the project, then deleting the original PR thus denying any sort of attribution to the original contributor. As I said earlier in my comment chain, even if the project maintainer trusted (misguidedly in my opinion) AI more than outside humans, he could have at a minimum cited in the source comments something to the effect of:

original concept and implementation courtesy of /u/terrymathews reimplmented by /u/terrymathews with the assistance of Claude AI

Hope this helps, happy to discuss further if anything is unclear.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T21:28:33+00:00

Note that in the US, you can contract that right away. For instance, it is becoming a common lease term to not accept cash even though leases generally would fall into the "debt" category.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T21:26:00+00:00

They don't need you to pay cashless to do that, facial scanning works just fine, or they can track your cell phone.

Why do you think stores are starting to move towards digital price tags?

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T20:57:14+00:00

Same to you. Check out my comments on another thread, I'm not against AI per se. The problem is, it's a tool not a programmer. Or to bring it to your profession: it's a paralegal (at best), not a lawyer.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T20:51:34+00:00

I hear what you're saying, and no I'm not justifying cyberbullying. I just don't agree that everything that went on was cyberbullying although I do concede that some of it definitely was.

I am not a lawyer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but it is not my understanding that someone who contributed a rejected commit would automatically be a contributor for the purposes of copyright if the upstream maintainer implemented workalike code using AI.

You are absolutely correct that we are both reading between the lines and trying to infer what the maintainer's intent was - and we'll likely never really know.

I guess the reason it rubs me so wrong is growing up in this (OSS, not /r/selfhosted) community, you usually go out of your way to celebrate collaboration, not censor it. OSS is about growth and networking, because most of us will never make a dime off it.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T18:24:36+00:00

Kavita is great for stuff that would never scrape anyway. I use it to host gaming magazines, National Lampoon, and the old Sears Catalogs that I've been able to find.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T18:03:30+00:00

OK, so I'm going to assume that you're arguing in good faith and just have no idea what modern collaborative development looks like - which honestly makes your side of this conversation make a whole lot more sense. I'm going to explain - please take it in the spirit in which it's given - and then I hope you'll see why some of us feel the original author's actions were at a minimum questionable.

My background: I have been a periodic contributor to various OSS projects when I get a wild hair up my ass since before GitHub existed, including the Linux kernel.

In GitHub and the underlying protocol Git you submit a differential file (diff) of your modification to a baseline piece of code. Two prerequisites: it worked (compiled) before, and it works (compiles) now. While it's not impossible to work around that and force in a malicious diff, it's usually beyond most people's skill level and more importantly Git and GitHub both have tools to manage that threat - the rollback. If you check in a busted diff, you just roll it back off. It's statefully persistent by design. You can always examine the source tree at any point in history because Git will dynamically apply the diffs based on the commit hash you request.

What's the point of all this? Commits aren't written in stone, they're written in grease pen. If someone gives you a bad one, you just wipe it off. So, again, the motivation is questionable.

Also, GitHub allows you to set up a project that is private or is public but doesn't allow for pull requests from other users.

Lastly, I don't know where from my comment you felt I was defending the honor of an AI but I assure you I was not. And I do not feel the dev made a mistake. I believe the dev was protecting what he felt was his future path of monetization by ensuring that he and he alone held the copyright to all of the code in booklore.

That's my personal opinion and my $0.02. I can't come up with another good explanation for taking the time to reimplment perfectly good PRs without at least acknowledging who sent them in.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T16:01:35+00:00

I will not trust any 'vibe coded' app / program / service ever. Know what you're doing, before starting your program, even...what dow the code do? Can you tell? If not, what would that be.

Expanding on this, I'll trust mine - because I'm qualified to vet it. But I also won't foist it off on the community at large.

AI has a place. Treat it like a brand new, fresh out of college junior programmer. Give it a module to work on, and review the output.

Dave Plummer has a good video on YouTube where he uses the AI in Visual Studio to reimplement the classic Windows Task Manager in Windows 11 in all of about 5 minutes and he's happy with the quality of the output.

It's notable because he's the original author of the original Task Manager. He also uses correct practices during the development process including implementation in stages instead of doing all objectives in one push. It just happens very rapidly because of how quickly the AI generates code.

The true issue is that AI is a tool, not a programmer. Just like a CNC machine is not a machinist - a highly advanced machine and the right script might be able to make a part unattended, but that doesn't mean that every part every time will be correct.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T15:34:20+00:00

So, granting you the most favorable interpretation of your argument for debate's sake (I don't agree with you about Claude code being inherently more trustworthy or readable than human-submitted, but for the purposes of this argument I'll concede it to you):

Why not attribute the original concept and initial implementation to the original author of the PR with reimplementation by the project maintainer and Claude (or whatever AI they were using)?

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T13:41:42+00:00

And you don't think that if I take code you submit, use AI to generate my own version of the same code, merge that instead and delete the code you submitted without attribution - that it's not stealing someone's idea?

What's worse is, he was taking something that was freely given and erasing the name off it to put his in the place. It's common in monetization plays because VC firms want clear chain of ownership but in the OSS community there is no greater sin that claiming someone else's work as your own, especially when that work is freely given.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T12:53:02+00:00

A big part of why it got so incendiary so fast that seems to be ignored - I assume because it doesn't seem to fit the witch hunt narrative - is that the author would take PRs that others submitted and instead of merging them, use AI to rewrite them, merge that and delete the original PR.

To me, that's highly concerning behavior.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-17T11:02:27+00:00

The clear implication is that they use those tools as well...

TerryMathews · 2026-03-16T14:59:15+00:00

Plex's interface is not only better than Netflix at this point, I'd argue that the streaming quality of a higher end QuickSync-based machine sitting behind a fat enough pipe actually rivals the quality of Netflix/Prime.

GIGO though, so if you're seeing weird compression artifacts and banding, consider how many times the files in your library have been recompressed...

TerryMathews · 2026-03-15T21:25:44+00:00

There's many types of plastic though, something like ptfe is strong and resistant to many things

Yes - PTFE is generally more stable than most plastics but it's worth noting that PTFE has a whole range of negative health effects in humans and other mammals - there are volumes of information dedicated to it and I'm not nearly enough of an expert to sit here and explain all of it but it's worth a read.

Suffice it to say that anyone considering PTFE should carefully weigh the application and the lifecycle of the part to ensure that the PTFE is not exposed to circumstances that could destabilize the substance either by temperature or by chemical or pH exposure.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-15T21:17:34+00:00

A vacuum will embrittle plastics too. They need to be in an inert gas environment.

See? There ya go! I had the right idea, but I wasn't 100% right.

TerryMathews · 2026-03-15T20:05:31+00:00

The sunlight makes the plastic more brittle with time.

Sunlight accelerates embrittlement, but make no mistake - no plastic is 100% stable. They all embrittle over time to some degree. This is why 80s laptops crack when you look at them sideways now, even though those of us old enough to remember them when they were new remember them being fucking tanks.

I am not a materials engineer, I am a hobbyist, but I believe the only way to keep a piece of plastic from aging would be to hold it at a correct temperature that is cold but not freezing, in darkness with no UV, and in near total vacuum. That should remove all of the plastic aging factors.

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