Posted by Fibonar 6 hours ago
> While xz is commonly present in most Linux distributions, at the time of discovery the backdoored version had not yet been widely deployed to production systems, but was present in development versions of major distributions.
Ie if you weren’t running dev distros in prod, you probably weren’t exposed.
Honestly a lot of packaging is coming back around to “maybe we shouldn’t immediately use newly released stuff” by delaying their use of new versions. It starts to look an awful lot like apt/yum/dnf/etc.
I would wager in the near future we’ll have another revelation that having 10,000 dependencies is a bad thing because of supply chain attacks.
> I would wager in the near future we’ll have another revelation that having 10,000 dependencies is a bad thing because of supply chain attacks.
Yes, but this also has nothing to do with native vs. non-native.
And not changing often is a feature, yes.
(I don't know what a "sane" distro is; empirically lots of distros are bleeding-edge, so we need to think about these things regardless of value judgements.)
But the data remains: no supply chain attacks on libc yet, so even if it COULD happen, this HAS and that merely COULD.
Do you think supply chain attacks will just get worse? I'm thinking that defensive measures will get better rapidly (especially after this hack)
I think the attacks will get worse and more frequent -- ML tools enable doing it easily among people who were previously not competent enough to pull it off but now can. There is no stomach for the proper defensive measures among the community for either python or javascript. Why am i so sure? This is not the first, second, third, or fourth time this has happened. Nothing changed.
Thank you for your service, this brings so much context into view, it's great.
I just finished teaching an advanced data science course for one of my clients. I found my self constantly twitching everytime I said "when I write code..." I'm barely writing code at all these days. But I created $100k worth of code just yesterday recreating a poorly maintained (and poor ux) library. Tested and uploaded to pypi in 90 minutes.
A lot of the conversation in my course was directed to leveraged AI (and discussions of existential dread of AI replacement).
This article is a wonderful example of an expert leveraging AI to do normal work 100x faster.
How, exactly, are you calculating the worth of your code? Did you manage to sell in the same day? Why is it "worth $100k"?
If it took 90 minutes + a Claude Code subscription then the most anyone else is going to be willing to pay for the same code is... ~90 minutes of wages + a Claude Code subscription.
Ofc the person earning those wages will be more skilled than most, but unless those skills are incredibly rare & unique, it's unlikely 90 minutes of their time will be worth $100k.
And ofc, the market value of this code could be higher, even much higher, the the cost to produce it, but for this to be the case, there needs to be some sort of moat, some sort of reason another similarly skilled person cannot just use Claude to whip up something similar in their 90 minutes.
Don't use bogus $ from sloccount. Just say I created a 10k line project.