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Comment by psychoslave | Hacker News Reader

CADT?

"Cascade of Attention Deficit Teens" - it's a phrase coined by jwz (of Mozilla fame) to refer to how some some projects (he specifically targeted GNOME) tend to throw out mature-but-imperfect code and rewrite it from one version to the next rather than addressing bugs and problems in the existing software.

I think it's a little unfair of him to single out young developers, but I have seen the 1.x -> 2.x rewrite before too so he's not wrong overall. If you want to read the original article search for "The CADT Model" - I would link to the article but JWZ shows requests with referer "news.ycombinator.com" an image that you may not like if you're at work :)

edit: oh I just clicked the link someone posted (in a [Dead] comment), it seems he has removed the functionality I described

> edit: oh I just clicked the link someone posted (in a [Dead] comment), it seems he has removed the functionality I described

Your browser probably just doesn’t send the referer header to protect your privacy.

Still has the referrer troll.

Weirdly I am now seeing it again. I don't know what happened :-S

> I would link to the article but JWZ shows requests with referer "news.ycombinator.com" an image that you may not like if you're at work :)

IMO anyone who has not configured their browser not to send cross-domain Referer headers deserves whatever they get. There is no user benefit for this privacy leak and browsers should have trashed it decades ago.

Gregory Casamento needs to build a GNUStep PPA for Ubuntu based distros, it would work great on libre derivatives such as Trisquel. Parabola has badly maintained repos for it, lacking even Gorm and ProjectCenter.

We need a DE for legacy devices as XFCE's development is not a sure thing with further GTK+ releases tied to Gnome and Red Hat.

> I think it's a little unfair of him to single out young developers

Yeah, though I think of “teenage” more as a mindset in this case.

Sometimes it's easier to rewrite a module, given inputs and outputs and a good test suite, than to understand how it works. This is even more true if the original developer is no more available.

Rewriting a whole big library, not easy either way.

Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers, I believe. A coining of jwz's.

Invoked for the tendency to do rewrites instead of maintaining and bug fixing, since rewrites are more "interesting".

Could also be a side coinage if I read it correctly as “Shiny Object Syndrome” , wanting to use the latest new techniques that are in the hype cycle.

CADT would imply this kind of sabotage is not happening on purpose. There are certain parties that have keen interest in a severely dysfunctional FOSS desktop. It's more like GSAW (GNOME Saboteurs At Work).

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

good old HTTP referrer at it again. A bit ironic knowing the source of JWZ's wealth!

Yep. That's why one of the first things I do when I set up firefox is to go into `about:configs` and change `network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy` to 1.

For context:

0: no restrictions/default

1: only send if base domain matches (i.e. news.ycombinator.com would only include the referrer for *.ycombinator.com links)

2: only send if entire domain matches (i.e. news.ycombinator.com would only include the referrer for news.ycombinator.com links)

I use an extension to always send the base domain of the target as the "Referer" and have not encountered any problems (or at least not any that I cared enough to investigate the cause for). It's absurd that Firefox still has this privacy leak by default considering how much they present themselves as privacy friendly.

Firefox some time recently cracked down on unnecessary referrers but they are still fairly conservative about it because it breaks some sites and if you are too aggressive about it then you end up with users assuming that's firefox not working properly.

Not since FF 87.

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