> Python is a dynamically typed language. That's exactly my point! The less "strict" the language, the more open to interpretation.

Your point, by your own words:

> However, the human language is not a programming language. It's open to interpretation

Is that a language is not a programming language if it is open to interpretation. It is a point that is demonstrably wrong.

In this case it's an excellent comparison. Many in transportation just liked the transportation aspect, and the switch from horse to automobile didn't matter. Some people were just there for the horses, and to them it did matter.

Why would you link to a four month old HN thread with no comments, instead of the link in the HN thread? What does that add other than an extra click?

The person running it obviously. How is that even a real question? Since when did an AI lab have the right to anything a paid user generated?

> I have never seen an automated attack on a PHP application that has bothered to hide its traces.

I'd agree with that sentiment, most of those scripts are the laziest they can be.

But I can't help but wonder if there's survivor bias going on there.

Quantity is a form of quality.

There's a vast number of operators who won't even look at their site when its performance craters due to a scrum of crypto miners all competing for resources. Why waste time on sophisticated attacks trying to fly under the radar of competent admins who will detect you by your egress traffic anyway?

I remember torrenting Tom Clancy's Endwar for the Nintendo DS. I downloaded the torrent, thought "the size is weird", unzipped the RAR file using the password on the site, and finding an executable instead of a ROM. I rolled my eyes and went to look for a different copy.

I was 11 at the time.

It's also great at cleaning up build artifacts of software I'm trying to compile before I even have a chance to run it. Wow! It was also very cool when it interfered with git in a way it couldn't detect, so I spent 2 hours diagnosing a bogus FS error.

Very cool Microsoft.

Nothing is stopping you from doing it manually.

Or you could put in the work and end up with a system that will let a non-technical family member type the name of a show that comes out next week and it will automatically search, download, tag, and add every episode on release to a Jellyfin instance for them to watch.

As we've seen in the past, the app doesn't have to be illegal. It just requires evil corpos with unlimited funding to allege that it is. Then the open-source developer is put in the position of spending money they don't have on lawyers or closing up shop.

Imagine being the guy trying to figure out why a Windows server is running out of space, and finding 23 million empty folders being used to define software for prod.