People occasionally read my blogposts https://cybersecpolitics.blogspot.com/2024/04/what-open-source-projects-are.htmlon Jia Tan https://cybersecpolitics.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-open-source-problem.htmland then ask me about open source development in general, and you can only, in your darkest heart of hearts (your only heart) laugh.

The other day I was contributing to a project that I am one of several developers on. In particular, I wrote a GDB script that traces through a function, printing out all the various variables and their sizes and this gets fed into an LLM to try to reason about it, which is a bit like asking a hedgehog how big a Unicode string should be to fit around the moon, but it was worth a shot, ya know? I have the kind of dyslexia that means I can't tell matrix algebra from a thinking conscious creature.

Anyways, while I am good at making GDB dance in particular ways, like knowing the ancient art of the Polka, I am not good at modern software development, and barely understand GIT or Docker or Cloud things. But I have hacked a few things, like ya'll have, and so my development happens in a VM and that VM has access to pretty much just the source code it needs and not a whole lot else.

But that's not how modern development works. It's common to see instructions to run "gcloud auth" and then walk through the web authentication portal from Google so your current user can access cloud buckets and APIs while testing or debugging your giant microservice. Like, people are out there just raw dogging source code from random other open source developers, with their local environment running tokens that give them access to everything they could possibly need from their Google account. People out there running curl www.badstuff.biz/setup | sh. People, and by this I mean developers, are lost storing five thousand fine grained GitHub tokens in various text files on their hard drive because they can't remember which one was which.

In other words: Jia Tan might have been a best case scenario for this community.

-dave