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ratherbefuddled

681 karma · joined November 6, 2012

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ratherbefuddled··on UK Defence Startups Are Being Denied Banking Services Under ESG Rules
Probably a blessing not having an account with Barclays. Try Allica.
ratherbefuddled··on Claude's AskUserQuestion: "No response after 60s – continued without an answer"
Turning this on by default is insane.
ratherbefuddled··on Claude Tag
I read this as "Claude integration to Slack is now billed as API usage". Is that wrong?
ratherbefuddled··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
Sometimes I wonder if people understand what "non-deterministic" means?

These things are generators of pleasing words. They are random and not at all thinking.

Why would anybody think that prompt guardrails would be effective?

ratherbefuddled··on Laws of Software Engineering
Typing ten extra characters is an investment that pays off vs the overhead of doing any piece of work in the future. There's no real downside here, it doesn't make the code more complex, it gives less surprising results.

I think you are conflating YAGNI and premature optimisation and neither apply in this case.

ratherbefuddled··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
It's not that it must be registered (incorporated) in Germany. It's that for tax purposes if the company is run from Germany it will be considered "permanently established" and treated as resident there. Permanent establishment laws are often quite surprising to people doing business across different territories.
ratherbefuddled··on Two billion email addresses were exposed
> If I've got a long, random, unique, securely-stored password, I don't actually care about having a second factor

I'm not comfortable with my entire online identity being protected by a single line of defence which is a company that I'm paying a few dollars a month to. Not having to type 6 digits off a phone is a pretty minor convenience for me.

ratherbefuddled··on How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
I'm more than happy to pay for DRM free epubs. I won't pay for a crippled rental of a book that only works on amazon or adobe blessed devices and can be confiscated on the whim of a corporation who won't be answerable for it.
ratherbefuddled··on The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain
Thanks very much.
ratherbefuddled··on The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain
Thank you, that's really useful.
ratherbefuddled··on The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain
Having just had solar and a battery fitted by Octopus I'm interested - would you mind sharing what you use for automation here please?
ratherbefuddled··on The worst possible antitrust outcome
We are talking about an extremely powerful corporation in an antitrust case not a person. It does not need to be defended in this way, which is a level of protection rarely afforded to individuals.

There is a definite public interest in understanding how Google conducts itself given the reach and impact it has.

There is no way for the public to have confidence in the trial process if it is conducted in secret, and given the outcome every reason to question the process.

I'm surprised anybody objective would defend this.

ratherbefuddled··on The worst possible antitrust outcome
There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done.

Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?

For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.

ratherbefuddled··on My imaginary children aren't using your streaming service
I read it as "stop asking me the same thing over and over again, I've already told you". It's a shame that the no doubt hundreds of UX people at Netflix are so sloppy.
ratherbefuddled··on Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
It wouldn't be surprising that de-regulation is good for innovation in the US, because "regulation" in the US almost always means corporate capture of a market through political bribery.

Regulation in territories where it is harder for corporations to buy politicians seems to be far more successful at driving improvements.

ratherbefuddled··on Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
Capitalism is always looking for ways to make complex, expensive work simpler and cheaper. Why wouldn't it?

The thing is it doesn't really matter what tools you use. The problems are complex and they don't become simpler just because you use an LLM. We will gain a bit of efficiency and then spend that gain on whatever new problems LLMs throw up plus the constant stream of new problems the world generates.

Software engineers are not getting replaced by LLMs any more than they are by UML, visual programming tools, RPA, MDD, code generators or any of the other fads that have come and gone over the years.

ratherbefuddled··on No Calls
> It's called supply and demand

Supply of the kinds of services under discussion here is rarely limited in any practical sense, so scarcity does not play.

> The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.

This ignores opportunity cost. Very few buyers have infinite cash, they do tend to have infinite ways they could spend money though and many of them will give a far better return than a couple of percent.

In reality if you're adjusting your pricing to try and extract the most you think you can get away with from the customer, you will lose a substantial number of buyers - and probably more so with buyers who have a technical mindset.

ratherbefuddled··on No Calls
The call offered here is optional isn't it? You can engage entirely over email for enterprise deals.
ratherbefuddled··on A marriage proposal spoken in office jargon
If I had to listen to this sort of shit on a daily basis I think I'd begin to understand why you all over the water are upset about the prospect of people taking away your big shooty guns.
ratherbefuddled··on Lord of the Io_uring (2020)
Technically Peter Jackson's :)
ratherbefuddled··on UK ICO response to Google's policy change on device fingerprinting
What purpose would punishing the Electoral Commission with a fine serve? It's a public body funded by taxpayer money.

They should simply be looking to prevent a re-occurrence and a fine on this type of organisation wouldn't help.

Perhaps they should have powers to prosecute executives.

ratherbefuddled··on U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions
Still perfectly relevant today as well.
ratherbefuddled··on The correct amount of ads is zero
Sometimes I end up watching US TV with US ads on some stream. They are horrifying and amusing all at once.

The idea that prescription medication is marketed to the general public on TV is entirely foreign to me, the descriptions of conditions that 99% of people wouldn't have heard of make me wonder just who they are connecting with.

Then you get to the "side affects may include headaches, vomiting, diarrhoea, haemorrhaging, spontaneous combustion, exploding eyeballs, bubonic plague and instant death - do not take this drug if you are a living breathing human being" bit and you can't help but laugh. Who goes to their doctor after watching one of these?

And "Dude Wipes" - I mean is that a spoof?

ratherbefuddled··on Warp terminal – no more login required
Exactly right. Warp have defined their market as vanishingly small here.
ratherbefuddled··on World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating
Mostly it increases teacher stress levels having to referee.
ratherbefuddled··on NIST to forbid requirement of specific passwords character composition
I've found it commonplace these days at least in europe that organisations use SSO via an identity provider that requires MFA for everything they can - even clients who are banks and utilities that usually move at a glacial pace.

The last time I worked anywhere with periodic password change was 8 years ago and they were phasing it out. The same place would reset your password to Monday123 if you got locked out (whether you needed a password reset or not) and forget to set the "force change" flag.

ratherbefuddled··on Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
So far this year the following companies have asked me for money for their new "AI" features:

  - slack   
  - github   
  - microsoft   
  - google    
  - atlassian   
  - notion   
  - clickup   
  - hubspot
So ask yourself: Who benefits from the hype? And who would benefit from a better general understanding of the flaws?
ratherbefuddled··on You'll regret using natural keys
> how will the surrogate key protect you? It will not.

Yes it will. Your changes will be confined to only the table(s) where the natural key is present, not spread across every table where there's a foreign key.

Of course you will still have to deal with the reality that the natural key is now not unique, and model reality, but your implementation work in doing so is far simpler.

In more years than I care to count I've regretted someone using natural keys as a primary key for a table many times, and surrogates never.

ratherbefuddled··on Friends don't let friends export to CSV
Ubiquity has a quality all of its own.

Yes CSV is a pain in many regards, but many of the difficulties with it arise from the fact that anybody can produce it with very little tool support - which is also the reason it is so widely used.

Recommending a decidedly niche format as an alternative is not going anywhere.

ratherbefuddled··on A Git client for simultaneous branches on top of your existing workflow
An aside but this is giving me ClearCase config_spec vibes.

Memory is hazy - possibly due to trauma - but you could create a config_spec which would make your view (roughly: working tree) pick up different bits of the filesystem from different branches. Branches might only exist on some of the filesystem, depending on how you set up auto branching and what you checked out, and you had to know what the config_spec rules everyone was working to were or the whole repository was effectively broken.

It was very complicated to get your head around - I guess not helped by the codebase I was working on at the time which tended to concentrate change in the same 20 files.

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