Of course it’s Primeagen. I haven’t watched this particular video, but I’ve seen enough of his videos to know he’s an idiot. I wouldn’t trust anything he says about programming, at least half of everything he says is wrong.
Most of the things wrong with PHP can’t be fixed, at least not without completely breaking all the existing PHP apps in such a fundamental way it would be tough to argue it’s still the same language.
It’s wild to me that people are still using PHP in 2026. It was known to be a god awful trainwreck of a language all the way back in like 2005 and it certainly hasn’t improved much since then. I guess that’s what happens when a language peaks right at the height of the dotcom bubble.
I’d assume many do, although some are likely just entirely out of their depth and are just listening to what the lobbyists are telling them.
There’s broad support for stopping predatory behavior by corporations that are targetting kids (and adults, but mostly kids). This is mostly the same stuff people have been complaining about for a decade or so at this point. Loot boxes, gacha mechanics, ad infested (and therefore stuffed with spyware for “marketing”), complicated multilayered digital currencies, battle passes, daily login rewards, etc. Basically all the well known dark patterns.
However rather than addressing the bad behavior directly, politicians either through malice or incompetence (likely at the behest of corporate lobbyists) keep putting forth these ID laws that just make things worse instead of actually solving the problem people have been complaining about.
At this point unfortunately both are needed. There should absolutely be official PSAs and news reports, but they also need to rope in influencers so that the brainrotted idiots who listen to people like Joe Roegan also get on board.
Yup, this is a golden opportunity for China. There’s a few hurdles left, but if they can clear them we could see this as the start of China absolutely dominating the memory market and these greedy morons are handing it to them on a silver plater.
Article provides 0 real details outside of saying they identified a certain number of sites. The only name they provide is highly suspect as they only explicitly name Cloudflare and that was only as an infrastructure provider for these sites which considering the nature of Cloudflare and how many sites they support is about as revealing as saying that they can be found using Google. Not a single AI provider or even model is actually called out.
I’ve been a professional programmer for over 30 years with some of the biggest companies in the world. I’ve worked with assembly, c, c++, c#, java, kotlin, perl, lua, haskell, rust, javascript, typescript, coffeescrpit, dart, php, python, and I’m sure 3 or 4 other languages I’ve just forgotten about at this point. Some of those languages are terrible and I hope never to touch again, others were great and I’d be happy to work with.
PHP should have been retired as a language 20 yeara ago, but WordPress has kept it alive all this time. The rest of the industry has moved on and learned lessons from what came before, but the sheer momentum of hundreds of thousands of WordPress installs has somehow kept PHP alive. The language started as a hack, and it remains a hack. It’s gotten faster over the years, but it’s still just as badly designed today as it was when it was originally created.