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This is one of the reason why that law will surely be challenged and very likely invalidated by SCOTUS. Trade secret protection is a very fundamental part and if this is forced to be broken by legally compelled speech, then it needs to have very creative interpretations over judicial precedents.

99% of the server code doesn't deserve trade secret protection, and fulfilling the goal of games continuing to work doesn't require releasing the other 1%. They can keep their matchmaking algorithm secret while releasing the code that lets people straightforwardly connect to each other. They can keep most of their code secret.

> 99% of the server code doesn't deserve trade secret protection,

Unfortunately, it is not you define whether it deserves. It's a court, ultimately SCOTUS.


What a fucked situation where a company that fails who took money from people on the premise of a service existing no longer offers that service, says it's against the first amendment to enable people to continue having access to the product they paid for.

As long as there is an option to give refunds then nothing is being compelled.

If this only applies to new sales then there is nothing that must be broken. The developers would need to choose technologies where license allows this. Those that don't wouldn't get new sales from game developers.

It's the same as GPL and similar licenses. If you don't want to publish your source that contains trade secrets then don't incorporate GPL licensed code.

There are also already various laws which compel certain types of speech. Consider things like nutrient labels or ingredient lists.


Many developers with good will actually tried that and gave up due to lots of problems. This is not just bad ROI but also a legal minefield. Engineers usually cannot argue against this kind of risks. Enforcing this will unlikely work in higher courts. Though something like open sourcing protocols for server reimplementation may have some chances.

While I see problems in the law but the spirit is reasonable. We need to push toward this direction. At least there should be difficult economical trade-off for publishers when they decide to shut down the game. Nowadays, some random executive just takes look into some excel, see some games have declining revenue and decides to "simplify the business" without much thoughts. This has to stop.


Because of high coupling dependencies between google3 projects, compiling just a single project usually pulls hundreds of thousands of different build targets.


All the developments are done in a virtual remote file system. From editing to compiling, everything is done remotely. Of course this does not fully stop people from doing manual c&p, but it still makes it hard enough to discourage it.


I guess it is much more frequent to maintain internal patches rather than doing all the merging work into upstream, especially the feature is non-trivial. Merging upstream consumes more time externally and internally, and many developers are working with an aggressive timeline. I don't think it is fair to criticize them because they didn't do ideal things from the beginning.


The quality of generated code does not matter. The problem is when it breaks 2 AM and you're burning thousands of dollars every minutes. You don't own the code that you don't understand, but unfortunately that does not mean you don't own the responsibility as well. Good luck on writing the postmortem, your boss will have lots of question for you.


Frequently the boss is encouraging use of AI for efficiency without understanding the implications.

And we'll just have the AI write the postmortem, so no big deal there. ;)


AI can help you understand code faster than without AI. It allows me to investigate problems that I have little context in and be able to write fixes effectively.


This is not very surprising. I've always thought that it's more of correlation than causation. If you're a good problem solver, then there is a good chance that you are probably good at both college admission and software engineering. So companies have been using it as their proxy for hiring because... why not. I'm not saying college curricula are useless, but this dependency on (imperfect) correlation might have caused significant opportunity costs for talent acquisition and now companies are slowly acknowledging it.


Uh, says no one who has been in the industry awhile?


Yeah, meet and chat (where each has their own bloat) are now integrated into the mail app as well. This contributes a lot.


I guess if they want to eventually deprecate the 2.5 family they will need to provide a substitute. And there are huge demands for cheap models.


I just hope them to provide an option to get rid of all those predictive models and just use a static, consistent layout. At least I can blame myself if my typo is from my own mistake.


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