Posted by greyface- 10 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(techni...
https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1rllcdg/megathre...
My LLM sense is tingling.
I still have a basic assumption that if something I'm reading doesn't make much sense to me, I probably just don't understand it. Over the last few years I've had to get used to the new assumption that it's because I'm reading LLM output.
I've been spending less and less time here, the moderation is obviously overwhelmed and is losing the battle.
https://aphyr.com/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-g...
I wouldn't be surprised if that group were the origin of this attack too.
It only clicked for me a few weeks ago, in one thread or another here when I realized that no one could ever do what Google did once: Cloudflare and other antibot technologies have closed off traditional search-as-the-result-of-web-crawling permanently. It's not that no one will do it because they think there's no money in it, or that no one will do it because the upfront costs are gigantic... literally it can no longer be done.
The internet died.
Mojeek is a good independent search browser, it isn't the best but at that Hackernews comment/analysis I was doing I found it to be the only one which worked for that case.
Brave exists too.
I know the situation is very critical/dire tho but there is still some chance. All be it quite small.
Mojeek IIRC, is operated by one single guy for 15 years.
Most claims of LLM authorship are erroneous.
https://danielc7.medium.com/remote-code-execution-gaining-do...
Also the language that has made me millions over my career with no degree.
Also the language that allows people to be up and running in seconds (with or without AI).
I could go on.
Well done.
> Also the language that allows people to be up and running in seconds (with or without AI).
People getting up and running without any opportunity to be taught about security concerns (even those as simple as the risks of inadequate input verification), especially considering the infamous inconsistency in PHP's APIs which can lead to significant foot-guns, is both a blessing and a curse… Essentially a pre-cursor to some of the crap that is starting to be published now via vibe-coding with little understanding.
PHP makes it easy.
One thing I particularly hate is when functions require calling another function afterwards to get any errors that happened, like `json_decode`. C has that problem too.
Problems don't make it a _bad_ programming language. All languages have problems. PHP just has more than some other languages.
The bottom half.
;)
Works great, but, like any tool, usage matters.
People who use tools badly, get bad results.
I've always found the "Fishtank Graph" to be relevant: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...
PHP works fine, if you're a halfway decent programmer. Same with C++.
Pretty much all of you missed the larger point. PHP was what allowed me to not work in retail forever, buy a forever house, never have to worry about losing my job (this may change in the future with AI) or being at risk for redundancy, having chosen to only work for small, "normal" well run profitable businesses.
Unless you're building a hyper scale product, it does the job perfectly. PHP itself is not a security issue; using it poorly is, and any language can be used poorly. PHP is still perfectly suitable for web dev, especially in 2026.
That isn't the fault of the language of course, but a valid reason for some of the “ick” reaction some get when it is mentioned.
Most modern web languages like nodejs are far worse due to dependency rot, and poor REST design pattern implementations. =3
PHP Warning: Uncaught Error: Undefined constant "flase" in php shell code:1
(Unless this was satire and I missed it)
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) maintains a significant financial surplus and a growing, healthy balance sheet, with net assets reaching approximately $271.5 million in the 2023–2024 fiscal year. This surplus is largely driven by consistent, high-volume, small-dollar donations, with total annual revenue often exceeding $180 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports...
[1]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/W...
[2]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...
Another key difference over the last 15 years has been the introduction of awards and grants, which didn't exist then but now comprise $26.8M (15%) of their expenditures. This is where most of the ideological/controversial spending actually goes, rather than the salaries per se, but even more to the point, this one line item is more than 3 times their entire inflation-adjusted budget from 15 years ago ($5.6M times 150% CPI = $8.4M) and is still more than if we adjusted their entire budget using the hosting cost as an index ($5.6M times 3.75 = $21M).
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/WMF_Annu...
Using hosting costs as an index is nonsensical. I wasn't able to find numbers for 2009, but since 2015 the monthly page views have remained almost exactly constant. So you might as well claim that they're vastly overpaying for hosting since inflation from 2008 is way less than 3.75x.
Ultimately every person has to decide for themselves whether they think WMF is a worthy recipient for their donations, but it is in no way operating on a shoestring budget nor staffed by volunteers anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...