Commented Links for 2020-08-02

Async/Await Fails, Facebook Complains About iOS 14, Telegram on Emacs, Go is Google Language, Copyleft is Copyright, Google Blaiming "The Algorithm" Again, Many Teams Fragmentations.

Beware of Async/Await

Not much as "careful with async/await", but "don't use async/await in the wrong way". And since async/await is in all the rage these days, in every language, the same problem can happen in any of them.

Facebook says Apple’s iOS 14 changes could hurt its ad targeting

You know Apple may be doing something right for a change when Facebook says a change will hurt them.

telega.el: GNU Emacs telegram client (unofficial)

Emacs kitchen sink just gets bigger.

pkg.go.dev is more concerned with Google's interests than good engineering

Again, I disagree with Drew in a lot of points, but I have to give it to him when he gets the point right.

One of the points of Git is its decentalization. Surely the de facto use of Git these days is not decentalized, but sadly centralized. And Google should know better, as they had their own Git repository (GoogleCode, anyone) and they just... fucked it up. And now, because they fucked it up, it seems they want to just screw it further, so people don't realized how they fucked it up.

And, again, Go is Google language. It's not yours and they are not interested in helping you there.

Open Usage Commons: a warning

Let's ignore the "world is ending" tone of the post here, and let's focus on what's here:

1. To help you trademark your open source project, you give up all your patents and such to the Open Usage Commons.
2. Let me repeat that: You give up all your patents to someone else.

Copyleft works 'cause, in the very deep, it is a copyright law; you can sue anyone that tries to steal your patents and trademarked content if, say, they tried to take your trademark away, or used their position to overtake as the "the one who knows it" from you.

One thing that remind me in the very start of the post is that GNU Foundation does the same thing: If you want to make your application a GNU application, you have to give your patents and trademarks to the GNU Foundation. While it may appear the same, they are completely different:

If you want to release anything under any GPL (GPL, LGPL or AGPL), your don't give anything to the GNU Foundation; it is still yours. If you want to make your application a GNU application, the GNU Foundation still have to accept it.

Trademark and copyright is very important to open source projects. Don't give them up.

Google blames algorithm for adding porn titles to train station search results

Once again, the mythical "the algorithm did it!" excuse. It's not "sorry, we did mess up with the training data", it's "the algorithm".

Google idea of "organizing the worlds data" seems far and far away when they don't even try to understand the data themselves.

Independence, autonomy, and too many small teams

I've seen this: Because people buy the "communication grows exponentially" and should make smaller teams -- which is correct. But they make "smaller teams" and not "smaller problems that can be dealt by smaller teams". And that's when things fall apart.

Honestly, to me, this feels a lot like failing to have a proper architect, someone who can see the big picture and think on ways to make all the pieces come together.