phatfish

I suspect is very hard to get a consultant that doesn't hand over a repo of AI generated nonsense right now. For the reason above, they are (usually) under time pressure to deliver, and they can wash their hands of the results at the end of the contract.

I am at 2 for 2 at the moment in the "infrastructure as code" arena (I wasn't involved with choosing to use a consultant, just dealing with the output). Which is an area that AI was supposed to eat for lunch. And it seems like it should, DSLs with a narrower scope seem perfect for an LLM, but I'm not convinced.

I think the issue is, infrastructure DSLs like Terraform or Azure Bicep are distilling down an architecture that has complex interactions and often needs a lot of "inside baseball" knowledge from outside of the code to create a congruent result. Unless you feed a bible of markdown files to the LLM to guide it in the right direction the output goes off the rails fast. The time spend creating the bible might as well be spent creating the code.

Of course there are areas where an LLM will definitely help, like re-factoring, stamping out boiler-plate or even building on a solid base. But attempt to create even a semi-complex architecture from scratch using a few paragraphs of prompt and you are asking for trouble.

The trouble with the consultants I have interacted with is they don't write the bible first, as far as i can tell they just iterate on slop and you end up with multiple 800+ line PowerShell scripts in IaC pipelines and other craziness that is almost impossible to unpick after they have gone.

Honestly, rather a "unelected EU bureaucrat" (What does this even mean? Are we going to individually elect the entire civil service, or require elected officials to delegate nothing and personally review every decision?) than an American tech-bro governing my internet usage.

The only people that think global free trade is a good thing are the top .001% net worth individuals which use it to wield power.

Trading blocks (like the European single market) are specifically designed to protect their members from shit that global corporations or other nations attempt to get away with.

I'm not sure what "Trade within Europe has massive restrictions." means without context. Compared to some Randian capitalist utopia where there are no rules and no governments? Or compared to before the creation of the European single market?

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. If I was to guess, that shoe company nonsense is the dotcom IPO equivalent.

I doubt it makes people sad (well not me at least) because the buy in to get Citadel to invest for you is what 10? 50 million?

You could hit up juleiie from above for his/her winning method I suppose, or you put a portion of your savings into an appropriate ETF and get on with your life.

The issue is, to regulate the service Meta (or whoever) provides, they have to age gate anyway. Unless the service is child friendly for all users. Which would mean; follow and friend limits, usage limits, blackout periods after 9pm, only seeing posts from friends, no algorithmic "time line". That sort of thing.

That regulation would be orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Just look at the malicious compliance the cookie regulations created, that was a single modal.

Better to just ban it for under 16s. That might happen before my kids are old enough to be fully exploited.

It's not being reductive at all. I'm certain parent commentor doesn't have kids so they don't care. If someone was using the street outside their house to deal drugs and causing problems they would be happy for the police to "regulate" that activity.

It's just selfishness. "I want some privacy utopia on the internet (which can no longer exist, the internet isn't the place of the 90s and early 00s), so your kids can be exploited by social media and porn".

I will do everything in my power to keep the tech bros out of my children's life. Yes, that includes being a responsible parent. It also includes societal norms being established. Just as was done for alcohol, nicotine, movies, porn mags ect.

I guarantee you are not as dedicated as me trying to protect my kids, so there will be age gates, and that includes VPNs.

Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free, so there is also a pretty powerful corporate interest to lock them down. In the case of the "corporate content provides" vs the "tech bros", the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I'll take a win however it comes.

Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it. I'd bet their user base skews to older people, more likely to be parents.

They also hired the eldest grandson of the most famous British fascist (Oswald Mosley) to be head of the UK division.

No idea what the grandsons politics are like, and the guy has to work somewhere. But, you get the feeling mentioning his famous grandfather in the interview was ticking a lot of boxes for this gig.

Make a mental note of the level of the air intake for the engine in your car, if the water doesn't make it that high you should be fine as long as you don't get stuck (no, i don't where it is on my car).

The engine gets damaged when water gets into the piston chamber i think. Water compresses less than air so important things bend or crack if the engine is running too long with water in it.

I wonder how electric cars fare with deep water.

Israel and America sure managed to set the bar low didn't they?

Or they finally tell Trump to fuck off as he as no tariff leverage any more as their economies are cooked anyway?

It is funny watching economies like Japan -- where their new prime minister was fluffing Trump like crazy -- get fully screwed.

The parent said American corporations. No one with any sense wants a dependency critical to their state or private company sitting under the direct control of America any more.

Valve have the money to pay developers to make a Linux port or ensure it works with Proton (maybe they already do in some cases?), if they really wanted to put the heat on Microsoft. Well, any not owned or being published by Microsoft i suppose.

Valve seem happy to let things happen more organically however.

Which naive souls are downvoting this? Anthropic is speed running Google's "don't be evil" mantra.

Well, it's coming and childless neckbeards or sex workers can't stop it. Restrictions on social media and porn for children is one of the few things that crosses the political divide.

You can bypass them to make your jerk-off extra satisfying if you like, i don't care. As long as the bar is high enough that kids in general are protected and a precedent is set in society.

Well, all Steam games have Steam DRM? The Steam store will tell you if there is additional DRM on top of Steam, at least it has in the past.

To the parents question, it is better to use GOG if you care about DRM.

Sometimes the Steam version is qualitatively better because the publisher/dev has supported the Steam version with more updates. Often the updates do turn up on GOG, but it's possible there is a delay.

But VW are bringing them back? The ID.Polo (seems like they dropped the Playstation style incrementing number for the old brand names) is the first of their new electric range with physical buttons for windows, climate, etc.

Basically the door and centre console have them back. Along with a touchscreen of course.

I don't think the bake-off to decide which superpower has the worst human rights record is going to land where you want it to. Hint, they both suck.

FWIW, I'll take the one not dropping bombs to keep their BFF happy, boosting right-wing shitheads, threatening to invade their real allies and slapping dumb tariffs on everyone.

Peak HN childless digital nomad comment.

> I’m sure what replaces it will be even worse though. :/

Hopefully not, it feels like regulation is catching up with the child exploitation. Once the giant platforms are dismantled and can no longer bully governments it will be easier to keep the smaller ones in check.

And no, "dark web Roblox" isn't going to be a replacement. Not matter how much the existing exploiters try to make it a scare tactic.

If i remember chrome:// used to have special meaning in Firefox (and probably well before that), and was used to tweak UI settings. I always assumed this was where Google took the name from.

This is a valid approach, and one i use as well. My wife likes flute/meditation music to help her sleep sometimes. Spotify is full AI generated covers in that genre, always at the top of the search results somehow, maybe because it is new?

Anyway, i spend an extra 15 mins digging through for older albums, of which there are some good ones from the 2000s and 2010s.

A good filter on human slop -- in genres where that can be a problem, like children's songs -- is to look for releases before it became popular to self publish on Spotify itself. Sometime around 2015 maybe?

There are definitely exceptions to that rule though (in both directions!), so i don't discount everything released more recently out of hand.

I know AI has it's sights on artists as it seems like the low hanging fruit (anything can be art!).

But for music especially there is a very deliberate process a human uses. Musicians looking to create something original are not pumping it out over the course of a day/week/month. It is something they have thought about for years. A lyric waiting for the perfect melody, a melody waiting for the perfect baseline, etc. OK, maybe there is a moment of inspiration where it all comes together quickly, but that doesn't happen in isolation.

I am sceptical an AI with no goal or understanding beyond it's trained weights and prompt can create something original (and good) in it's entirety.

This is in contrast to technical tasks like coding, where regurgitating best practices to solve an iteration on an already solved problem is a valid approach, for everything except bleeding edge. No originality needed in that case.

Are you upset that Russia's attempt at occupying Kyiv was hilarious bad (from a military point of view, obviously not as far as the Ukrainians are concerned), and Russia has lost any chance of retaking Poland for generations?

Corporations already have a "digital ID" for everyone. As we know from WW2 (and more recent conflicts) private corporations would be lining up to work with the next Nazi regime if the price was right.

The article is actually one of the better ones I've read. The technical analysis is somewhat above my head, but appears reasonable, and it is suggesting solutions in some cases rather than just dismissing the concerns of parents, and going full privacy nut about our democratically elected governments.

All i would say is that the solution doesn't need to be 100% effective. The same as real world "age gates" or ID verification (which is just some random person looking at your ID in most cases) are not.

The precedent set -- that everything online should NOT be immediately accessible to children -- provides parents (the ones that care at least) with some backup when trying to raise their children. Ultimately society as a whole is responsible children, and i don't want to live in a society that thinks it is fine for kids to scroll any content on social media and watch porn as soon as they are able to work out how to use a smartphone.

The replay attack mentioned may always be a loophole, I'm not sure. But any site hosting the replay attacks should be targeted for shutdown/blocking. The "source" ID must come from somewhere as well, so that could be a route to shutting them down (there are 100's of age verification requests against one ID each day, that's a bit weird...).

If parents are helping their kids bypass age gates or straight up don't care their 11 year old is watching porn, then there is not much to be done in that case. The key thing should be keeping the majority of children in compliance to give cover to the parents that do care. Not giving all the power to bad parents and social media companies as is the situation the moment.

At the moment in the UK (where any mention of digital ID sends half the population mental) you have to email a whole raft of ID docs and personal data to estate agents, mortgage brokers, solicitors etc. to get an ID check done. Or use a private ID service that can have a cost associated and may not be any more secure than my passport scan sitting in someones M365 mailbox. You can't know.

I'd be happy to have a government service replace all that nonsense, where a one-time challenge code could verify my ID. There is now a UK.gov "One Login" authentication used by other government services that is essentially a digital ID as far as I can see. It just needs to be made mandatory for ID checks by law.

Such a service can also be used for age verification with the correct privacy controls in place, far better than all the dodgy age verification services that exist now.

Digital ID and age verification are going to be a part of the internet going forward. I'd rather have a government service that (in a functioning democracy) has accountability to the citizens that use it. ID verification is also a natural monopoly, so the government picks a winner anyway.

I will agree that governments are happy to bend the knee to corporations. But corporations control social media, so why would the corporations themselves not further their agenda using the platforms they control? Be that simply letting chaos ensue (see the UK Southport riots that were sparked by a "news story" from Pakistan) or from tuning the algorithms directly.

People have control over their government, at least in democracies that are functioning to a basic level (see Hungary recently). But they have zero control over social media, in fact the only organisations that can control global billion dollar tech companies are nation state governments...

How we measure things in the UK has been dragged into political debates (Boris floated the idea of forcing supermarkets to list weights in pounds and ounces "again"). So critical thinking or sane decisions are out the window on this front.

Although there is some logic to keeping miles per hour for road speed limits as there is a big cost associated with updating all the signs and associated "documentation".

An organisation like the BBC have to make sure to use imperial measures (as well the one most people actually interact with), otherwise Reform voters have a meltdown.