Quote from: AdolfinWolf on March 30, 2021, 08:00:26 PM

Huh I missed this memo. Porting everything over from AngularJS to Vue?

Imagine devving a forum from scratch around a stupid framework and not even releasing it before LTS ends for your stupid framework (AngularJS Cheesy

).

Everything on this forum makes me rage nowadays

Sheer incompetence.

Awww, rewriting it with a different frontend framework. That is a classic! It is almost as good as a total rewrite in a more fashionable language. If I were to develop the new forum software, I would write it in C; then, I would realize that C is not Cool, and I would rewrite the whole thing in Rust!

That has been my suspicion about Epochtalk for years—since before I even had an account here: It is intentional.

For you see, intentionally incompetent bespoke software development is often a cover for money laundering. If you know a guy who knows a guy, there are guys who do this service to small business owners who want to save on taxes; and I reasonably suspect that a large proportion of Daily WTF-tier enterprise software consulting is graft, a conduit for senior executives to divert shareholder equity. Come to think of it, I suppose that the same scheme would work for money raised with donations.

If done properly, the scheme is bulletproof. An incompetent developer can never feign adequacy; whereas a talented developer can easily write poorly designed, bug-ridden, unmaintainable code that languishes in Development Hell for eternity. To an auditor, the latter is indistinguishable from the former.

To be prepared in case of an audit, they guys offering these services do develop something plausible. They meticulously maintain source repos of unmaintainable horror-code. They deliver demos, alphas, and betas (but never a finished product). And even in case of closed-source projects (which are the norm), they have no qualms about showing all of this to any investigator who may ask; if necessary, that is a part of the service.

The business can write all this off as an expense. It can be an astoundingly large expense, because—well, have you ever seen what software consultants charge!? Meanwhile, after the “developer” takes his cut, the money somehow finds its way into an offshore bank account. It helps if the “developer” either is located in a foreign jurisdiction, or has such global connections as may facilitate running up his own “expenses” and “obligations” to make overseas remittances.

In case of diverting funds for graft, such complexity is, of course, unnecessary. Taxes can even be paid, to avoid the high risk of being “Al Caponed”. It is all so much easier, if the objective is simply to pilfer from shareholders (or donors) whilst feigning “transparency”.

I hate to mention all of this, because it is unethical to broach such speculation in public. If my longtime suspicions about Epochtalk are correct, then unless someone is being scammed, I should mind my own business! And if I am wrong—if this is a crazy conspiracy theory, like the notion that NFTs are 90% cover for money laundering and graft—then I risk drawing the Eye of Sauron to innocent people who are not doing anything illegal. Rumours, gossip, reputational damage, police harassment, tax audits, unjust prosecutions—so many are the ills which may thus be caused. To flap one’s lips on the Internet about this stuff is a lose-lose proposition.

Well, whatever—for the record, my longtime suspicion is the reason, and the only reason why I have never criticized the New Forum Vapourware. I hate stupidity! But I always chuckled at Epochtalk: Wow, LOL, thermos has a good thing going there. (That was my reaction because until a few days ago, I didn’t realize that the new forum software was funded by donors’ money; I presumed that it was paid for with the proceeds of a privately held business which auctions ads, and has other sources of revenue.) Terrific amounts of BTC have been “dissipated”; and nobody can prove that it is not all a matter of

Quote from: AdolfinWolf on March 30, 2021, 08:00:26 PM

Sheer incompetence.

[ANN] Nulltalk, the new new forum software

Quote from: AdolfinWolf on March 30, 2021, 08:00:26 PM

Everything on this forum makes me rage nowadays

Me, too. Let’s do something constructive about it.

I propose that I myself should indeed write the new new forum software. As aforesaid, I will write it in C, then rewrite it in Rust; if I need to take more time, then along the way, I may also rewrite the code in Java, C#, Go, Javascript, Python, C++ with Boost, C++ without Boost, COBOL, MUMPS, Solidity, Visual BASIC, LISP, FORTRAN, and/or Brainfuck. I don’t know many of these languages; thus, the schedule slippage will be spectacular as I spend time learning. My proposed schedule is to deliver a feature-incomplete pre-alpha demo by the 2028 Halving, a beta before BIP 42 becomes economically relevant, and the official 1.0 release before the heat death of the universe—maybe. I’m so slick!

The project is called Nulltalk, because its distinguishing innovation shall be that it autobans all users, and stores all posts in the /dev/null NoSQL database. Thus, there shall no talk. Silence! Hey—if John Cage could sell records this way, why can’t I build a forum that forbids all discussion? Also, I shall integrate the zero-dimensional graph-theoretic /dev/null NoSQL cloud database with Blockchain, because Blockchain has maximal synergies with buzzwords in Enterprise NoSQL Cloud Blockchain.

AdolfinWolf, perhaps you should apply to join my team. You shall write (then rewrite) a feature that battles the silence with noise: Your module shall create new users and new posts from /dev/random, and my module shall commit them to /dev/null. I will then use a pomo text generator to write a paper about the transgressive metaphysical singularity of a forum that, given infinite time, shall create and destroy all possible posts by all possible users, and the social subtext of Nulltalk’s design as an implicit hypostatic critique of the paradigmatic institutional framework of dominance and submission that gives rise to the dialectic of cyberbullying (ah, cyberbullying: do it for the grievance studies lulz!).

This is art!

Anyone who is interested in donating to my new new forum project should contact me privately. Cool