You’re welcome 🙂

I posted what I could legally post on my Github, and I made sure it’s easily discoverable. If you need it, you’ll find it very quickly.

I have no reason to keep it for myself or my employer, since it’s GPL. Also, I kind of like the idea of distributing what the unhelpful company I got it from only gives upon request: when they do that, they comply with the GPL, but in the most unhelpful way possible. With what I posted, nobody has to request that stuff ever again, and I cleaned up and updated their code too.

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They already know. I’ve posted all the good I think of their device, as well as the author of the open-source debugging app that runs on it (it’s actually a generic device), on their official Reddit sub. But it’s just a general comment, not tied to this account of my little GPL adventure.

The artists - or any other workers impacted by AI - will not be able to resist the tidal wave of shittiness, for one simple reason: the corporate world wants AI very badly, precisely to get rid of expensive artists and workers. It doesn’t matter to them whether AI is good or bad provided it lets them replace their expensive human workforce.

Unfortunately, in today’s dystopian capitalist world, when companies want something, everybody must bow to their wishes and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop them. It’s sad but it’s the truth.

Actually this happened in the lab. I know exactly who did this because he told me: we were discussing what had happened and he said “Oh yeah, Daniel and I needed to connect this Windows machine to the intranet quick because we had something urgent to do, and we connected all the ends of the nest of ethernet cables at random until the machine connected. And then we left everything as it was.” But bad luck for us, their machine was connected, but so was that fatal cable on both ends. It just happened that their machine kept working well enough for them to finish what they were doing without noticing the problems rightaway.

And in case you wonder, there’s no penalty in our company for owning up to honest mistakes, so that’s why he readily admitted to it. Only people who never do anything never do anything wrong.

Yeah I keep calling them hubs incorrectly…

Well possibly, but here’s the thing: if I don’t say anything, I don’t have to worry about having to explain myself later.

This is just a software project, I really really like my job and I have other hills to die on frankly. So I just don’t need the aggravation.

The particular open-source license doesn’t matter: they’re doing all they can to not release their source code and that’s what I need to fix their stuff.

I can’t sadly. It would make it obvious which company I’m talking about, and if ever read this thread, they could retaliate against us.

My employer is openly willing to let the engineers work on whatever they want, however long it takes to make things good or better, not just good enough. The bean counters don’t run this place: we take the time to do things right.

It’s a policy that has worked for us for the past 40 years, and it’s the main reason why our customers come back to us and we’ve been consistently very successful over the decades.

Anyhow, originally one of my colleagues asked me if it would be possible to compile and debug our code in VSCode instead of the company’s IDE. I said I’d try to see if it’s possible, and then I went down the rabbit hole - with my boss’ blessing 🙂

I can’t really say because it would make it obvious which debugging tool I’m talking about and that would out me. And then the company could put 2 and 2 together and find out who my employer is and… you know, our orders might become slow or mishandled, that sort of things. My company’s entire business depends on that one supplier, so it wouldn’t be good.

Fixed. Thanks for the proofreading 🙂

You assume I’m paid 20k per month when I’m paid a lot more than that 🙂

Anyway, not to worry, we’ll recoup that money next year when we won’t have to renew our license for the 10-so development machines.

This one is kind of the same thing: it’s a bone-stock FTDI 4232H probe with a bit of logic tacked on to disable the chip without a custom init command and a custom USB PID/VID. All I need their driver for is to enable the chip. After that, I can just use the open-source FTDI driver. But the driver makes everything super-slow, so the point is kind of moot anyway.

Probably another attempt to go around the GPL actually, because they use the FTDI driver to talk to the chip (because the open-source libusb is very slow in Windows) and that too can’t be linked to the GPL debugging tool. So the probe masquerades as a custom device.

Techlore isn’t about preaching rules or activism

What is it about then?

It’s TOTALLY about preaching rules and activism: they advocate for privacy and purport to educate people on how to achieve better privacy.

I read their reasoning and it sort of makes sense: what they’re saying is essentially “We do Discord because that’s where the people we want to reach - the folks who don’t know anything about privacy - hang out.”

Well, I get that. But it’s kind of like Al Gore saying his flying around the world and spewing megatons of CO2 doesn’t matter because he’s doing that to promote environmental causes. I don’t like people who exempt themselves from the rules they preach, whatever their reason. People who walk the talk are usually more convincing.

But yeah, they do have a point I guess…

Oh I didn’t know that. Privacy-wise, Discord is… suboptimal to say the least.

Wow… The land of the free is really starting to fell like 1933 Germany now…

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