klabb3

> VisaNet & friends make the modern consumer world go round.

I mean, as opposed to what? You could apply this to any infrastructure cartel like with AT&T in the 90s or Comcast or 100s of historical examples. The alternative to a bridge troll is not ”no bridge”.

100% agree. Wow I can’t believe how many think sandbox builds is an actually good idea, on a per language basis too. There are completely standard QoL issues in cargo that have been open for years and nobody is working on. Maintaining a sandbox for idk 3 operating systems minimum that have virtually no sandboxing support? For extremely diverse workloads that typically invoke commands? I mean.. good luck.

There are still elephants (or rather mammoths) in the room for supply chain security, such as having 1500 nested deps for a standard project. It’s like we never woke up from the nightmare of leftpad.

If your project had code from 100s of individuals, new versions can be pushed instantly, and nobody wants to review the code, then you have a time bomb. And also other problems.

I believe that in all of EU you can just look at the ”comparison price” which is per-weight and listed below the normal price. It’s also very useful for quickly comparing similar products directly in-store. It’s a great piece of no-nonsense regulation that counters a lot of the deception, and instead favors competition on the price-quality axis, ie healthy market dynamics.

1000%. If you have the luxury/curse of _building_ the house on empty land simulating light is extremely important imo. It determines everything from layout of rooms to window placement to furnishing etc. (You probably don’t want eg sun behind TV). Even ants orient their dwellings with respect to sunlight.

This reminds me of this argument with libertarians/ancaps:

A: rich people pay less % in taxes than wage workers, we should close the loopholes

B: but taxes are immoral to begin with

A: ok, but can we do something now about the unequal enforcement? Unrealized gains, tax havens, trusts, fake charities, etc?

B: well a society based on property rights… ackhully you should read this book by Mises/Rothbard/Rand

> Maybe the more interesting thing is how far people are going to 'fight' against AI?

All ”AI resistance” I’ve seen is not against the tech, but against human bad actors behind AI: unethical procurement of training data, reckless application, low effort high volyme spam, replacing humans, centralization of power, dependency on megacorps etc. I think a lot of people have become less tech-positive after the ad-tech era that brought us social media, unprecedented levels of surveillance, freemium rug pulls etc. It’s much easier to understand the resistance if you place it in that context, rather than imagining millions of sleeper agent luddites suddenly coming out of the woodworks.

There were two major flaws with the rollout of USB-C, none of them technical:

To have unmarked cables. This should have been explicitly forbidden by spec as non-compliant. Today unmarked is the norm, even with premium brands. And the few ones that actually mark their cables have their own markings (which I assume is because the official logos are so incredibly bad). So now instead of wondering if the charger will work, you’re wondering if the cable will work.

Secondly, the USB-C rollout was only successful on the sink (device) side. Almost all cheap gadgets come with an A-to-C cable, and chargers and PC ecosystems are very biased on the A ports for the host side. This created an awfully ugly side effect: devices are not always compliant with even basic charging. Since C-to-C should not have live 5V line active at all times, these devices don’t charge at all. I think they’re missing that resistor that tells a compliant charger to make it live. But in either case they only work with A-to-C.

Why stop there? If you _use_ handwritten products you’re ngmi. I only use vibe coded operating systems, JavaScript sandboxes, compilers, TLS libraries, databases, rendering engines..

Im not a security engineer at all and I have an instant gut reaction to floats in regular code. ”How big can this get? Is it deserialized? What arithmetic ops are happening? Any risk of rounding error propagation?” etc.

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily mean I deem it bad practice in security contexts since again, I don’t know. But if an expert doesn’t consider those things, I would be surprised (and a little scared).

In engineering you have tolerances to deal with non-determinism. ”Within these bounds” and ”given these assumptions then…” is the foundation of building something _on top of_ those things. LLMs are the same, it relies on heavily exact Turing machines as input but its output is entirely unstable. Even if you can get determinism it will never get anything resembling ”bounds” out of the box. That makes it a poor foundation for building on top of. Ie it’s not a screwdriver, it’s the monkey who’s holding it.

I do not understand the need to argue that monkeys are better than screwdrivers at screwing. Just let the monkey be the best version of a monkey.

It’s not necessarily symmetrical, and in fact would be very surprising if it was. It’s a probabilistic algorithm on both sides, so the energy use to find any working program vs all bugs in a working program are fundamentally different search spaces. Not to mention the false positive rate and the human verification effort. Then even the idea of incremental security checks is potentially flawed since many security issues are non-local (ie not localized to a single module).

> Only very rarely I have seen examples with obvious differences between monitors when showing green objects, e.g. some documentaries with certain vividly colored animals, like some insects, birds, frogs or lizards.

According to the article you get purified greens from transmittance through foliage, ie backlight in eg a maple forest. This makes me suspect that it may be more important than just exotic animals, and maybe we are more sensitive to ”greens” than we think? For instance, a lot of my photography of trees/forests tend to feel much more ”green brown mess” and loses structure when going from reality to screen. (Another explanation is that my photos are bad, but I like that one less)

This is truly an (accidental?) setback of color reproduction as it has progressed over time. For LED lights R9 is also crucial for skin tones which makes it so bad to just leave that out. Now, the mass produced LEDs are even optimized for CRI at all are virtually all excluding R9, which may be one of the main quality issues that many people perceive with LEDs vs eg incandescent. There’s of course more to it but R9 probably has a disproportionate effect for being a ”minor detail”.

> The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network?

This is so stupid. It’s really like truth social. Having a private company with closed source pretending to be open and sovereign (whatever that means), adding ID verification by scanning your passport, it’s like.. gasoline for conspiracy theories. They’re so incredibly tone deaf. It’s like being back in the early 2000s when the older generation didn’t understand the internet. But it’s 2026…

Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like. That would at least serve some value. You can’t have both the social part and the control of the narrative.

> Sure, but the process is "what you do" which directly contradicts what you're saying.

”What you do” was just short for the _activity_ that you’re doing, eg ”I am coding” or ”I am building a car”, which does not determine the extent of how creative it is. Building ikea furniture from instructions would be low on the creative scale, whereas making a chair from woodworking might be higher, for most people.

> Sure but most programmers don't do [side projects]. My point is that you cannot reduce commercial work as not creative just because it's a 9-to-5.

Of course not, some people find that perfect match. That said, employment is not optimized for creativity, so it simply appears unusual that it’s conducive to highly creative work. This is my theory of why many programmers pick up hobbies outside of 9-5 where they have better preconditions, whether it’s side projects (same domain) or woodworking (different domain). Some find it at their 9-5, and some don’t feel much urge.

> we'll still consider them creative since it is a basic requirement at their 9-5. That is my point - both of them are creative. […] Degrees may vary depending on subjective perception but that was not what was being discussed.

I don’t think it’s even meaningful to discuss creativity without acknowledging that it’s both subjective and that degrees may vary. And yes, problem solving is probably always creative to some degree. But the degree is the important part.

So, I wouldn’t call _them_ creative or not, because again I don’t think it’s a personality trait nor binary. Only the person doing it can tell how creative it feels. Personally I felt mostly uncreative when doing corporate work. I would have loved for it to feel creative, but it didn’t.