botanical76

Does this actually work? I would think it will be out of date by at least weeks, and I'd be surprised if their crawlers actually iterate through every issue page.

I don't agree with your conclusion, but just wanted to say the segment on "roast nothing" was hilarious and absolutely true. Quite right that many cuisines depend on meat to be worth eating. I'm just happy that the food I eat no longer consumes animal lives; the mechanism to do that is a triviality compared.

This is my experience as well. If you want it to write good tests, you have to take a much more involved approach of first making it establish what needs testing in each module, writing each test one at a time, and making it prove that it can break the test by modifying the source code to introduce a bug, modify the test to be appropriate, rinse and repeat. I haven't done this much because it's very expensive in terms of time and premium tokens...right now, I just write most tests myself so at least I have faith in the verification suite.

I understand your concern, though your suspicion is a little shortsighted. It can be personally dangerous to volunteer for projects that directly circumvent the control of the establishment.

I mean, I talk like this as well. It's not really intentional. My interests influence the language that I use.

Why is the rationalist movement asinine? I don't know much about it but it seems interesting.

Can you explain the subtext here?

Many Android devices are unlockable, you can run your own software, and yet we still have a problem. This problem exists irrespective of what you can technically do with the hardware due to the vote by corporations to favour device "security" over user freedom. A phone is useless to most people without the apps they depend on.

AI coding is in many ways antithetical to great software engineering.

It is the current spear-edge of the investor pressure to ship products faster, and monetize users more aggressively, all at the cost of quality, reliability, ethics, security.

If you, as a software engineer, once held an ideal about programming as an art or craft, AI coding flies in the face of all that.

It turns out that maximising for short-term profit leaves many other objectives behind in its wake.

Yes, with major tradeoffs. Asahi Linux is an amazing project, but they have not yet figured out how to get anywhere close to a Mac's power efficiency when it is running MacOS. For example, you will lose a lot of battery life[0][1] with the lid closed, whereas on MacOS you lose pretty much nothing.

Also, note that thunderbolt not yet supported[2].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20241219125418/https://social.tr... [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/262 [2] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overvie...

Note, GrapheneOS seems to have been able to secure partner access to Android early security releases, but this comes with the cost that the source used to make these special "01" builds is private until general availability. This might not be a tradeoff that LineageOS is willing to take; GrapheneOS has provided the option on a recommended opt-in basis.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27068-grapheneos-security-p...

I imagine so. I understand that Opera GX, for example, provides a specialized version to Russian IPs that locks down the search engines that can be used.

Can you provide more context on this?

As I understand it, it's just a nostr client, so it uses nostr's decentralized network of relays.

When trying to login via GitHub, I was redirected to "https://wakana.io/login?error=An+unexpected+error+occurred+w...", without an error message being displayed.

Well, rewriting entire features without tact can be a little toxic in collaborative environments. There may be good reasons for the design that does already exist, and those reasons may not be backed by the test suite, and you may only find out about them once you've burned through a month of dev time and further changes on top of the rewrite.

You should consult the code owner or primary set of authors before proposing a large rewrite. But if you do this, you should understand very well the pros/cons of throwing away all of this old code, documentation, and unit tests that have an implicit dependency on the existing structure.

I worry that if you are just vibe coding and letting the AI rewrite everything at will, you could not be further from understanding the details involved.

Seriously. Stop using LLMs to "help" you do stuff you already know how to do.

Why?

It's also understandable why services opt to use a Cloudflare proxy, what with the growing threat that is DDoS attacks from large botnets.

I feel we should build an extension to HTTPS to allow Cloudflare / other reverse proxy services to proxy web requests without circumventing the SSL guarantees between the user and the host. It should be trivially possible.

That said, the cynical side of me worries that it works this way by design.

Why bother? They can just visit Cloudflare HQ, who already proxy 19.3%[1] of the internet. AFAICT, all https traffic proxied by them is accessible to them in plaintext. Of course, Cloudflare are disallowed by law from letting us know if the UK government were surveilling all of their proxied traffic.[2]

[1] according to this particular metric: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cn-cloudflare [2] "the IPA makes it illegal for companies to disclose the existence of such government demands." https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/21/apple-pulls-encrypted-i...

IANAL

Isn't it self evident that this person has principles if they have left their job over it?

Does Visa Insights save lives?

I would implore that you just write a blog post or two (or three) instead, but it is your choice of course.

I can't even find the price anywhere. Do you have to install the software to see it?

How do we actually beat this narrative? I've been proposing a E2EE-based chat application to my friend, and they asked me a similar question: won't it just be rife with pedophiles? How can you make a platform that will be used to that means?

I have strong views about privacy as a fundamental human right, but I don't know how to answer that question. I certainly don't want to make the world worse, but this feels like a lesser of two evils type of deal: either make it even harder to catch bad actors, such as child abusers, or make it plausible that your government take away your freedom forever.

If Signal can do it, then why doesn't Apple make a stand?

Have you tried the AI intellisense models like Copilot?

I don't understand the notion that it is faster to generate repetitive code with keyboard macros. I use Vim-mode exclusively, and while I'm not a Vim master, I don't think there's any set of macros that will do what Copilot can do.

It's not that Copilot is smart. It's that 60% of what I do doesn't require much intelligence to anticipate. It is the 40% that matters, the remainder can be trivially guessed, and this is exactly what Copilot does.

Maybe this will help: you need to imagine with an AI intellisense that with each keystroke, you are collapsing the possibility space down to a smaller, finite number of outcomes. You write exactly what code you need for the dumb AI to predict the rest of it.

There are a LOT of reasons why AI intellisense is not all there yet; it can be distracting; it can try to generate too much at once; none of the tools have LSP integrated, so it will provide bullshit suggestions of library methods that don't exist. This is all true, and yet it is still highly valuable in some domains, for some people.

That said, if you write x86 assembly for a living, you are probably out of luck.

(I write Kotlin, Java for Android apps and services, C++ that is tightly integrated with the SoC. Python and Bash for command-line tools that invoke REST APIs. Copilot is useful for these domains.)

Well, I notice there is a lot of pressure in organizations for individual developers to start making use of these tools. I was already using AI extensively before my company picked up on it, so it doesn't really affect me negatively, but I notice some of my coworkers starting to ask questions like "Do I have to use it?". The status quo seems to imply that you {refuse to accept change,aren't willing to grow,aren't interested in increasing efficiency in workflow} if you don't use AI tools / autocomplete.

So while it is unlikely anyone is _forcing_ you to use AI-enabled efficiency boosters, there may be a strong managerial pressure felt to do so, and it may even be offered as an action item in yearly reviews, and therefore strongly linked to compensation / incentives.

That is all to say, I understand if people in this group are frustrated with the AI hype train at the moment, even if they can appreciate that these tools do indeed improve efficiency in some places and in some people.

Android has very good reason to have such strict process isolation. For example, that third party calculator app I downloaded shouldn't be able to interface with my bank app. That said, I do feel it (Google) has used security as an excuse to build a walled garden.

How would you do Android differently?

My interpretation is that it is an argument against trust in authority in privacy discussions.

A: Privacy matters! B: Why should you care if you have nothing to hide? A: If you have nothing to hide, then give me the password to your Facebook. B: I don't trust you with that, but I trust my governments and relevant authorities.

The point is that B's faith in authority is flawed as the "powers that be" are an eternally shifting target. By agreeing to government surveillance, you place trust in every subsequent government, even the ones you would rather not.

This is so disheartening. I thought we were making progress in the anti-surveillance privacy narrative, but this says otherwise. As a UK citizen, is there anything I can do to dissuade this?

edit: typo

I do think there's value in manual formatting some code sections. For example, very large arrays, or alignment of semantic parts of a group of mathematical expressions. Ultimately, I think the only thing that matters is that the code is readable, consistent and you don't spend much time on how it looks.

That said, if you have team members who somehow can't or won't copy the surrounding code style, then automatic linting sounds necessary.

Do you not buy that a user's IP location needs to be protected?

There is a reason applications go to so much effort to proxy requests to resources such as images. It's not free to do this.