Just to be clear, MIT’s role was to catch him out by finding his hoovering laptop hidden in the janitor’s cupboard and reporting him to cops. JSTOR didn’t want to prosecute but the government did, presumably because he helped scuttle SOPA & PIPA and was clearly going to be a powerful thorn in their side in future.
Unfortunately MIT gave the government the excuse they were waiting for to destroy him.
That is what I recall from the documentary anyhow.
iirc, MIT could have denied access to FBI in setting up a trap to whoever was the owner of such laptop. They could’ve set the trap themselves and dealt with academic discipline too. So, they did enable the up-scalation of the conflict.
Of course, it’s all subjective at this point… either I recall incorrectly some details, or even how I unconsciously choose to see it is shaped by personal world views.
I have my repos on Codeberg and one of the ‘disadvantages’ is that, well, it’s a non-profit, so I genuinely don’t want to waste their resources.
They ask you to only host open-source repos there, meaning that using it for backups of shitty personal projects, even if I would throw in an open-source license, is just out of the question for me.
And that has weirdly been a blessing in disguise. Like, if it’s not useful for humanity to see, do I really care to keep it around forever?
And I’ve had three projects now where I felt an obligation to push them over the finish line of actually making them a useful open-source project. Which had me iron out some of the usability shortcuts I took, made me learn a good amount of code quality stuff and of course, just feels good to complete.
Well, Codeberg is a non-profit. I would say if it’s just a few kilobytes/megabytes of code, upload it and donate $10. That should be enough to store that for decades.
I sometimes look for small stuff. Boilerplate code, how other people configure stuff that isn’t well documented, niche interest stuff even if it’s not finished. Sometimes stuff like that is useful.
That’s why I host all my shitty unfinished projects in a Gitea instance in my VPS. Now they actively cost me money and I feel (a tiny bit) more incentivized to do so something with them!
I once had a program fail to compile, but when I compiled it a second time it worked. No idea why, best guess is some kind of caching or dependency issue that got resolved by restating the compiler.
Now every time a program fails to compile and it’s not immediately obvious what the problem is, I instinctively compile it again just in case. Well more like three or four times.
This is my dog after she discovered she could pick her own blackberries. Too bad blackberry season isn't year round because she sure expects it to come back every day.
I absolutely love the natives huckleberries we have here in the US Pacific Northwest. They're also related to blueberries but have some tartness to them.
Our neighborhood has the Magical Chicken Wing bush. The dog thoroughly inspected it for months afterwards, and still checks on it now and then just in case.
programming.dev
Top