koliber

Less than the volcano.

Software is still eating the world. It was always about efficiency. It was about getting rid of manual data entry by building CSV based export-import flows. It was about getting rid of hundreds of chatbot operators answering mundane questions with an AI bot that could do a decent job with the easy-but-voluminous conversations. Now it’s about getting rid of the tedious coding jobs and replacing them with code gen tools.

In each of these cases, lots of relatively low-value jobs were no longer needed and a few very-high-value jobs sprang into existence.

The author of the article loves coding. But software is about solving problems efficiently, not punching the keyboard. The other parts of the job might not be as fun for everyone, but they are even more valuable than typing code. Great programmers could always do both. Now they can focus on the higher value work more by leveraging tools that can do the lower-value work.

Work is not supposed to be fun. That’s why they pay you to do it. If it was fun, you would have to pay your employer. (Tongue in cheek advice).

What if your son suddenly decided to do this to your accounts? How well would you take it?

When your mom or grandma gets swindled out of her retirement, this will start making sense.

I'm willing to guess that securing that window was in no one's backlog, and this was not an issue of either swelling crowds not of stretched staff. It was a security failure.

It's always US-EAST-1 :)

My recommendation is to use AWS, but not the US-EAST-1 region. That way you get benefits of AWS without the instability.

That might be the case. However, we should not invent new things where old things suffice. Maybe it is as simple as importing digital content, and all that is different in this case is the medium. It's already illegal to import DVDs that contain illegal content into the UK. The person or company that is doing the importing is on the hook. Apply that logic to the the internet medium and we're all set.

As was mentioned in another thread, it is simpler to go after the companies abroad than to build out measures that would prevent such import. Those measures would probably take the form of some sort of firewalls. They would be noticeable to the British people, and the British people, being sensitive about their civil liberties, would not like that. It's easier for Ofcam to go after a couple bigger companies, impose no cost on the British public, and tramp national sovereignty into the ground a bit along the way.

What does it mean to provide services in a jurisdiction?

4chan offers services at it's web servers which are in the US. People from the UK come over, access the servers in the US, and then import the content they see into the UK. 4chan is offering services locally in the US. People come from all over the place to access those services in the US.

With Alibaba it gets complicated. There are things like duty free warehouses where things can be on US soil but legally have not yet been imported. But that does not apply in the UK. 4chan does not have servers or proxies in the UK. If it did, Ofcam can go after those local entities and I would not bat an eye.

4chan is exporting. The consumer is importing. That distinction matters.

We agree in essence. I just called the avoidance of dealing with the pushback laziness.

> The [Online Safety] Act explicitly grants Ofcom the legal authority to regulate online safety for individuals in the United Kingdom

And so they should, within the borders of the UK.

It's illegal to own unlicensed firearms in the UK. In the US, it is legal. UK authorities can prevent ownership of firearms in the UK via penalties, prevent firms from selling firearms in the UK, and set up import controls to prevent people from importing guns bought abroad. They cannot prevent foreign companies from selling firearms abroad.

Ofcom can institute penalties for UK consumers who access illegal content, prevent firms from providing such content on UK soil, and put up firewalls to prevent people from digitally importing such content into the UK. They cannot prevent foreign companies from providing such content.

Ofcom is being lazy and is trying to offload the responsibility to foreign firms.

Safety and liberty are often at odds. Let the UK decide the balance for their citizens and let their citizens bear the benefits and costs of implementing the measures.

Agreed in a general sense, but there's a bit more nuance.

If a knife slices bread like a normal human at p50, it's not a very good knife.

If a knife slices bread like a professional chef at p50, it's probably a very decent knife.

I don't know if LLMs are better at asking questions than a p50 developer. In my original comment I wanted to raise the question of whether the fact that LLMs are not good at asking questions makes them still worse than human devs.

The first LLM critique in the original article is that they can't copy and paste. I can't argue with that. My 12 year old copies-and-pastes better than top coding agents.

The second critique says they can't ask questions. Since many developers also are not good at this, how does the current state of the art LLM compare to a p50 developer in this regard?

Most developers are also bad at asking questions. They tend to assume too many things from the start.

In my 25 years of software development I could apply the second critique to over half of the developers I knew. That includes myself for about half of that career.

We've come full circle.

Credit cards were offline-only in the beginning. When have we lost this ability?

See https://www.google.com/search?num=10&sca_esv=5e043526353aa70...

You can grieve before someone finally passes. My grandma lived well into her eighties. Her final two years were not great but we did what we could to make it better for her. When she passed it felt like a good part of feeling for her hardship has already passed, together with the relief of knowing that she is no longer suffering.

Grieving is important. To do it properly be close to those who need it. Dying is a process and not a moment. Be there for those that need it and give yourself room to do it properly as well.

I loved every word of this post. But do keep in mind that flowers do make many people as happy as scratch off tickets.

How do you handle compliance questionnaires from companies that adhere to SOC2 guidelines? If I used Klavis how would I tell my clients which information I send to which external partners?

I love Notion but the API leaves a bit to be desired. To build a 2 way sync the API should allow the same functionality that the UI offers. Right now there are some easy things I can’t figure out how to do in the API:

- add a date tag to a text block

- create a code block longer than 2000 characters

- set a code block to wrap

This is based on very limited interaction but it feels like I’ve hit many snags early on. I imagine things get harder when you get into some of the more advanced or newer functionality.

Please invest in the API. I will only love Notion more.

How does the device compare to the computer we used to put a man on the moon?

Tracking is negative. However, tracking + mandatory badly implemented consent banners everywhere feels even worse to me than just tracking alone.

I get the choice, but I make the choice I like less because it is more convenient to make it. If we only look at the positives, then the situation is better. But we have to look at the cost, and there is a cost, in terms of time and mental effort, to read the banner, figure out what the choices are, and if I am not accepting all cookies, how to go through the process of rejecting some of them. Sometimes it's very involved.

Also, I am an educated consumer and understand what a cookie is. Most people do not and do whatever is necessary to make the consent screen go away. Because of that, effectively they don't get this choice.

As one of the parent posts said, if it was implemented on the browser level, I would get the choice, and the cost of making the right choice would be smaller. If the defaults were to "reject unnecessary cookies" then most of the population would get the benefit.

The way it is right now feels like a net negative. Most people don't know what the consent is about and will not spend the time to learn it. Companies still find ways to track you that agrees with the letter but not the spirit of the law. I have friction whenever visiting a new website (or an old one that forgot my choice). The only winners are people who don't value their time and are smart enough to understand cookie consent. That's a small percentage of the general population.

That’s in theory.

In practice these banners regularly break. They are hard to click on certain devices where the button is off screen. If they use JavaScript and there is an error elsewhere, you can’t hide them. And I regularly see them over and over again on the same sites because for some reason they can’t track me effectively for this purpose.

In short they are a regular minor annoyance that does take time and effort.

It's true that they are different, but I would not say that they're very different. There is a considerable group of people here on HN who have a narrow definition of what an ad is.

Advertising and marketing are indeed two different things, but the distinction is blurry and the overlap considerable. I've read through the comment thread and it seems that advertising and marketing seem interchangeable in the way they are being talked about.

I think you hit the nail on the head - people tend to think of push (outbound) marketing as "ads" while they don't think as much about passive ads.

It's true that it's harder to do push / outbound marketing in a way that does not feel annoying. I've seen it done and it seemed like the company was reading my mind in a good constructive way. That's rare though.

> My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise

We're fully aligned. The original point I was trying to make is that advertising can be done well, in a way that is compatible with this objective. Unfortunately, in many cases they aren't.

> In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to

I thought about this a while back, and I think being bombarded with requests for consent is worse than being bombarded with ads. Cookie consent banners convinced me.

> My kids should come home with a flyer for it.

Fliers are ads.

> I will actively seek out and research a car.

Probably in some classified ads.

My point is that all ads are bad and marketing can provide value for consumers.

Pointing out an egregious case of advertising that does not deliver a net positive does not disprove that point. There are plenty of examples of bad advertising. It does not take a lot of effort to find them. But from that extrapolating that all advertising is bad and calling all jobs related to it as useless is excessive.

I am taking a broader definition of ad to include things that also have other names.

- job ads and classified ads that can also be called listings

- ads for events that can also be called notices

- product description on services like Amazon and Ebay

- websites describing products and services

- 1st hand and 2nd hand mentions of products and services online that can be as close to the

Some of the comments here seem to hold only for a narrow definition of ads.

I prefer to think of all of this as marketing, as ads are part of the marketing mix. As we see, the distinction between ads and other similar things is blurry.

I am not defending the volume of ads. There's way too much of it. I am making the unconventional and unpopular statement that sometimes marketing and ads do deliver value.

It's better to narrow the critique of ads the way you did because that leads to a more constructive conversation.

> If you ACTUALLY wanted to go to that concert, you would have looked up the tour dates for the band six months ago

I am lazy, am not a super-fan and don't follow any bands, but if someone who I kind of enjoy is playing in town, I appreciate hearing about it.

> There are probably hundreds of tools for "easily finding a time for a meeting" that you can buy online

Here's the rub: there was a time where I was not aware of the fact that this class of tools existed! I learned about it through an ad.

The assumption that I see repeatedly is that we think that we know what we want. If we really strongly desire something, that might be more true. However, there are times where we are not even aware that we *can* want something. I did not know I can want a meeting scheduling assistant because I did not know that such software even existed. I did not know that I *can* want to attend a concert because I did not know the band was playing in town. Advertising enabled me to want something.

It's humbling to realize how much I don't know. I appreciate all the ways that the world let's me know about things, even if it comes from a marketing department.