"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"

That's what we do in closed source corporate code.

"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?"

"I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history."

"Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."

Makes you wonder if the reason why some trivial bug in a closed source project goes unfixed for years; is because all the engineers are afraid to touch the code in some obscure library and instantly become its new 'owner'.

I'd be tempted to try to trick them into merging a small change so then they're the new owner and have to figure it out themselves.

The Passing of the Curse

Yeah at work I’m paid to own some components that I didn’t write and don’t entirely understand, so I figure my job is to help discover answers for the questions that arise.

I would not want to be a public maintainer though. I don’t have the patience or motivation to use my spare time for that.

I like this, turning software maintenance into a long-running game of tag.

I like to refer to it as the cooties ownership model. I.e. once you touch it you have cooties.

we call it stinky egg.

Jia Tan has entered the chat. (Jia Tan was the alias used by the group that backdoored XZ utils by becoming a maintainer)

My other comment in this thread has more details, but in my experience it’s more common to encounter projects that don’t want new maintainers or forks. They’re happy with the status quo with their name at the top but also don’t want to let go of control or see competing forks created.

"Pikaboo maintainer is who last touched it. Patch is wellcome!"

I wrote something then realised I was writing a critique on SEO blogpost slop from a consultant for a consultancy. 3/10 - would not do again.

Author here. That reaction is fair, and I won’t argue taste.

This wasn’t written as an SEO play or a lead-gen piece, and it’s not meant to be a comprehensive framework. It’s closer to a framing memo I’ve used internally with teams that were about to say “we’re going global” without having made the decisions that phrase quietly skips over.

If you already operate at a level where “global” is never confused with a market, then the post won’t offer much. Where it tends to resonate is with teams who say they know this, but still let country names substitute for concrete choices in planning and execution.

Totally fine if it didn’t land for you — appreciate you reading it seriously enough to react.

> Nvidia will no doubt sell custom Groq-like chips for inference now.

For $0bn they could have sold an Nvidia-like chip for inference.

How many pounds is it? Whos on first?

The chants of "lock her [their political opponents] up" ring out from their rallies.

We all know the correct, American way to deal with democratically-elected Presidents of foreign nations is to overthrow them, bomb them or if all else fails assassinate them.

They should all have been using the same redaction tooling.

If I were to hazard a guess, pure speculation, I would say the unretrievable parts were court / previously redacted and the retrievable parts are the latest round of panicked rushed redactions.

Furthermore, this happens so often, so frequently, in so many high profile cases that even my 80 year old mother knows this "secret hack to unredact a pdf".

If you are CIA / FBI / Court / Lawyer or professional full time redactor of documents you should know that the highlighter doesn't delete the text underneath it.

I think the more likely cause was precisely that it wasn't a technical professional/lawyer/writer doing the redacting, but someone in the administration or close to it that has no idea how to redact information correctly.

Make A16Z Great Again

> We have learned counters for them over the years.

Using $1m a piece missiles