jeffparsons

> just stops shy of asking Australian tech companies, like Fastmail, to build backdoors into their products so that the government can "legally access" data from them

It stops just short of saying that you must do thispreemptively, but is pretty clear that you must do it if they ask you to.

Basically the same phrasing was widespread before LLMs were invented. So I don't think it's specifically motivated by that.

I don't have any special certification or arrangement with Anthropic; this is vanilla Opus 4.x via Claude Code.

It may be worth noting that Claude can and will (if it believes you own the code, at least) produce PoC exploits for exploitable bugs that it finds.

My only source for this is personal experience, and no, I can't share any evidence of it.

I've regularly heard something similar said of consulting work, too. Many people new to the game worry about charging too much, because if a client is paying more then surely the pressure will be higher. Instead they end up experiencing the opposite: charging a higher rate tends to get them a better kind of client.

I'm not sure what the exact lesson is here. Something about stingy people not being nice to work with, perhaps?

Amazon, for example, charges us for cloud resources and then charges us again (handsomely) for the privilege of submitting bug reports to them. And then sometimes, even with a clear, deterministic repro for a bug with no plausible workaround (besides "stop using the feature"), where the fix is probably as simple as "pull a fix from upstream open source repo" or "sic Claude on it for 10 minutes", the bug remains open for literally years.

This is very different from "I didn't read the instructions on the screen and now I'm calling support". Both scenarios exist. I have some sympathy for businesses facing the latter, and much less for businesses facing the former.

Claude won't answer questions about what cities you should nuke in what order. The Pentagon wants Claude to answer those sorts of questions for them.

Edit: oops, I misunderstood. This seems to be more about contractual restrictions.

Or in case some folks find the addition of a computer confusing here, if someone sends you a physical letter and they've used correction tape or a black marker to obscure some parts of the letter, and you scratch away the correction tape or hold the letter up to a light source to read what's underneath, have you committed a crime?

I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the law has to say about this. But I do have at least a small handful of brain cells to rub together, so I know what the law _should_ say about this.

It's possible without specific hardware acceleration, but murderous for mobile devices.

RDS, Route53, and Elasticache are decent, too. But yes, I've also been bitten badly in the distant past by attempting to rely on their higher-level services. I guess some things don't change.

I wonder if the difference is stuff they dogfood versus stuff they don't?

Additionally, what has been the correct choice five years in a row might be catastrophically wrong in the sixth year. We need some randomness injected into our behaviour so that some people are always making "suboptimal" choices, to stop everyone from crowding into one local maximum and then getting swept away when the rare but inevitable flood comes along.

This email is from a Debian maintainer, about Debian introducing a new hard dependency on Rust. It's not some random Rust advocate telling Debian folks that they should use Rust against their will.

Yes there are absolutely some obnoxious "you should rewrite this in Rust" folks out there, but this is not a case of that.

Good question. I'm not primarily blaming Discord or the other company for this (even though they both obviously share some responsibility, too) — I'm blaming government/legislators. I'm arguing that the government agencies/departments that own the relevant forms of ID should have been required to develop the capability to facilitate this sort of secure ID verification _years_ ago. Instead policy makers ignored reality and rushed through this legislative hatchet job... and here we are yet again. As anybody who's been awake during the last few decades could have predicted.

Tangent: I've regularly been required to provide copies of my ID to all kinds of businesses simply to function in society — i.e. in practice there is no realistic option to opt out. Want to rent a house? X points of ID. Want a phone? X points of ID. Pretty much every real estate agency in town has copies of at least my driver licence. And they in turn share my details with tenant database companies, credit reporting agencies and so on. Do you think many of these businesses have good data handling practices? Of course they don't. And so all my details are available for purchase in bulk data sets on the dark web, and get refreshed by new data breaches every few years. And yet government still treats it as somehow unexpected each time this happens, or wags its finger and bemoans those naughty criminals, instead of developing any kind of policy that would start to address the underlying issue... which is that our personal details are spread so far and wide in the first place.

The third party company shouldn't ever need to see the IDs, either. Same issue.