lucumo

Oh, okay. I misunderstood what you meant by walk on/walk off.

I find the exact planning ahead of time more annoying than a security checkpoint, so was hoping you found a better solution.

> When I’m in DC I swipe a card, walk on, walk off. Same with New York and Amsterdam. Even Netherlands into France is walk on/walk off

What train did you take to France? Everytime I go to Belgium I have to be careful to pick a train that doesn't require me to book a ticket on a specific train. I really like the "I'll get the next train whenever I reach the station" that domestic trains have. For long distance international trains that seems to only still be available to a limited set of trains to Belgium.

Almost. My point is that you have to see if a union is good (for you).

> Your union blocked this because your employer was trying to break your unions negotiating power by separating your interests from the collective workforce.

Be that as it may, for this specific employee the union was a negative. In effect, he is asked to sacrifice for the collective. It's understandable that that's acceptable to the collective, but it's also not hard to see why the sacrifice wouldn't like that.

> The rising tide lifts all boats.

Apparently not ALL boats.

> There is no reason for any employee to not search for unionization.

That's a very theoretical view. (As most absolutes are.)

Unions and rules around unions can be very different depending on locality, industry and other specifics. The power and benefits a union gives a specific employee may not outweigh the cost they impose on that specific employee.

Furthermore, unions are organizations. They have their own internal power structures that can be corrupted by self-serving individuals or special interests. A blanket "union = good" view can make that invisible to you.

The advantage of SPAs, like the checkboxes page, is that they can do the round-trip less visibly. The user can still continue the next thing. So even if it is slow, it's less of a deal than loading and rendering a page anew.

> Is it slow though? Like in practice?

The multi-page wizards? The ones I've seen were. Enterprise crap systems.

The standard answer to that is that some technologies make one harder than the other. That's kind of true from first principles, but it requires making the case that e.g. React is actually harder to make good than a plain HTML page.

Fun thing, TFA describes a kind of multi-page wizard style form that I haven't seen a lot anymore in the last decade or so. But when I did see it, it's always some dogshit enterprise system. Some Oracle product for expensing expenses last time.

The problem with those things always seems to be that they are slow in the middle of doing your task. Every button is seconds of waiting. Doubly annoying if you have to go back a step or two. The badly coded SPAs seem to be slow at the start. It takes a while to load, but once it's loaded its performance is usually okay.

I looked into the other names you've mentioned.

KNDS is certainly planning to IPO later this year, but with only 20% of the stock free floating. The plans are that the French and German governments will own 40% each.

Arquus is not owned by "Belgian John Cockerill", it is owned by the John Cockerill Group, which in turn is owned by Frenchman Bernard Serin.

Naval Group: 62% owned by the French Government, 25% owned by Thales.

While it's certainly not wholly government-owned, it really doesn't look like a private sector either. For some companies the publicness looks a lot like a fig leaf.

The French state owns a 26.6% of the shares in Thales, with 36.4% of the voting rights. The Dassault family has another 30% of the voting rights. A combined controlling share.

The Dassault family has very close ties with the French government and defense industry. There's no doubt in my mind that if the French government gets serious and says "Jump!" Dassault would just ask "How high?"

The situation with Airbus is a little more healthy, with the French government share being much lower (11%), and the German (11%) and Spanish (4%) governments balancing it out a bit. Airbus is also a smaller part of Dutch defense. Still, none of those governments is Dutch.

The fact that the French government owns more of the Dutch defense industry than the Dutch government is a problem.

> For France it certainly is, probably because of our stubborn focus on strategic autonomy.

You're seeing people wake up to the threat now, with the opposition against Kyndryl and the Nexperia thing.

Somewhat more controversially, I'm also worried about the French government owning large parts of the Dutch defense industry through Thales and Airbus. (And, to a lesser extent, German and Spanish governments.)

Very little of the Dutch defense industry is still Dutch-owned. Only Damen comes to mind.

> I wonder if these people just need to talk.

No. I need to create. That energizes me, and I have far too little time for it.

NZ is (famously) often cut off from maps.

Surprisingly, The Netherlands is missing on this map too. It's not just missing data: Germany and Belgium gained a lot of North Sea shore.

I was actually interested in the Netherlands, because my country has for the last 80 years followed policies with the express focus of never having a food shortage again, even during world wars. It's agricultural output is insane for a country with its surface area.

Better terminal emulators probably played a role too. In particular the newish Windows Terminal. The older cmd.exe console only supported Windows Console API. WinTerm has full VT and ANSI support, much better font rendering, and less importantly, mouse support and Sixel support.

This makes it much easier to build cross-platform TUIs. It used to be a chore, now it's probably easier than most GUI frameworks. (Possibly with the exception of Electron, but that comes with a different set of trade-offs.)

Well, obviously. What else did you expect to be the most dangerous thing on roads? Sharks?

It's got our number... https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en&to=Hacker+News+speak&tex....

"I like burgers." in Hacker News speak:

> I'm curious if anyone has looked into the scalability of burgers. Honestly, I've been DIYing my own patties since I realized the local joints aren't really optimized for flavor-to-cost ratio. Does this even have an API?

My college classes usually had one offline written test per quarter, and about half the classes had an assignment with them. I can see how those would be easier to cheat on now, though they were already hardly cheat-free. (Not just plagiarism, also free-riding on group assignments for example.) The written examinations carried the heaviest load precisely because of that.

Offline written tests solve the issue quite well. They scale well too. At least as far as assignments do.

People saying that oral examinations are the last bastion of cheat-free examinations are really over-stating the case.

> But some universities (maybe most) have massive classes where a professor may never have an actual conversation with some students.

Probably most yeah. At least it was my experience.

There's something viscerally distasteful about a one-liner comment berating the author of a long thoughful comment for exerting too little effort.

Why would oral verification be needed? Hand-written answers on paper in a proctored classroom should still work fine. That was the way most verification worked when I was in school, and still is the most used verification method used currently around me.

Homework assignments are harder, but those were always a bit difficult for teachers. It's not like cheating was invented by Gen Z...

I would say that you also don't know the false positive rate. The only person who truly knows is the one who wrote/generated the text. And they have every incentive to say it's not AI-generated, whether or not it truly is.

Personally, when I see the number of accusations thrown around, I very much suspect that the false positive rate is pretty high.

> At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing.

And yet people seem to still be terrible at that. Someone uses an em-dash and there's always a moron calling it out as AI.

> I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them.

My personal take is that it doesn't really matter. Most posts are already knee-jerk reactions with little value. Speaking just to be talking. If LLMs make stupid posts, it'll be basically the same as now: scroll a bit more. And if they chance upon saying something interesting then that's a net gain.

I think that's Gemini trying to personalize the answer specifically for you. It really leans heavily into that to the point of being galling.

You can give it additional instructions in the settings, but you have to be careful with that too. I've put my tech stack and code preferences in there to get better code examples. A while later I asked it about binary executable formats and it started ending every answer with "but the JVM and v8 take care of that for you."

Which is both funny in an "I, Robot" kind of way, and irritating. So I told it to ignore my tech stack. I have a master's in CS and can handle a bit of technical detail.

Turns out, Gemini learned sarcasm. Every following answer in that thread got a paragraph that started with something like "But for your master brain, this means..."

Yes, and it's a detection loop without feedback. You can never verify that a piece of work in the wild is actually AI. The poster is the only one who really knows, and they'll always say it's not.

This is a problem, because you can easily get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop. You feel strengthened in your convictions that you're good at ferreting out LLM-speak because you've found so much of it. And you find so much of it because you feel confident you're good at it. Nobody ever corrects you when you're wrong.

Combine that with general overconfidence and you get threads where every other post with correct grammar gets "called out" as AI generated. It's pretty boring.

There's a similar effect with contentious subject. You get reams and reams of posts calling the other side out for being part of a Russian/Israeli/Iranian/Chinese troll network. There's no independent falsification or verification for that, so people just get strengthened in their existing beliefs.

> Perhaps if Sweden adopted a different policy it would have an even longer life expectancy!

The policy of being between 55 and 69 N? I'm not sure the world is ready for another viking age.

Joking aside, GPs point was that Sweden has long nights and long days. Based on the studies you'd expect life expectancy to be worse there than in more Southern parts, like most of Canada. It isn't.

So because we're used to it? I know perfectly how those C numbers will feel. Haven't got a clue about the F numbers.

Anyway, I doubt that that analogy goes for noon. I eat lunch by the clock, not when the sun's highest. I expect most people do. Especially the ones that are cooped up in an office during the daytime.

> Then a brick hits you in the face when it dawns on you that all of our tools are dumping crazy amounts of non-relevant context into stdout thereby polluting your context windows.

Not just context windows. Lots of that crap is completely useless for humans too. It's not a rare occurrence for warnings to be hidden in so much irrelevant output that they're there for years before someone notices.

It's latin. "de omnibus" on the second line is pretty well recognizable. But holy hell is Gutenberg's font terrible. Look at the first word on the second line, it ends in seven undotted sticks that seem to bleed over into each other a bit. I read that as "mim" before I figured out it was "num".

Anyway, it's the Gutenberg bible. The epistle of St. Jerome, according to the alt text.

> Sounds like every AI KPI I've seen. They are all just "use solution more" and none actually measure any outcome remotely meaningful or beneficial to what the business is ostensibly doing or producing.

This makes more sense if you take a longer term view. A new way of doing things quite often leads to an initial reduction in output, because people are still learning how to best do things. If your only KPI is short-term output, you give up before you get the benefits. If your focus is on making sure your organization learns to use a possibly/likely productivity improving tool, putting a KPI on usage is not a bad way to go.

Plain CSS is very useful if all you have is an HTML page. Giving all buttons a consistent look is nice and easy if you can just specify that with a nice CSS selector. That's also the only place you can do it without changing all <button> tags.

If you're building a component-based UI, that need is less, because all your buttons are created in a specific Button component. That's also an easy place to attach styling. You don't even need a separate file anymore.

But that's a wash. It gets much more interesting if you have components that are used in different contexts. Unordered lists for example can be an unordered list in the running text, but also a navigation list in the footer, the menu, or as tabs. There's some semantic logic to having those things as lists, but they usually look completely different.

You'd use classes and descendent selectors to deal with those differences. The downside is that those leak very easily to instances that you don't want them in. Having normal lists inside tabs inside running text requires careful engineering of the selectors.

The larger and older your project grows, the harder it becomes to get that exactly right in a future-proof way. At some point changing something for one item somewhere, can completely mess up something on another part of your site.

Inline styling, or Tailwind-style utility classes, are useful in that situation. Every component gets to be responsible for the way it looks and no longer has to care what anything else does. HTML tags that are used in different contexts will have their context right there, next to the styling. All part of the component.

The few remaining things that you need for consistency between components (colors, sizes, fonts, etc.) can be handled with CSS variables.

:-D

I did ask G'mini for synonyms. And to do a cursory count of e's in my post. Just as a 2nd opinion. It found only glyphs with quotation marks around it. It graciously put forward a proxy for that: "the fifth letter".

It's not oft that you run into such alluring confirmation of your point.

Not long ago, a statistical study found that AI almost always has an 'e' in its output. It is a firm indicator of AI slop. If you catch a post with an 'e', pay it no mind: it's probably AI.

Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.