ifwinterco

That's the problem then - if the actual amount the company wants each employee to spend is maximum €200/mo, $500/mo or whatever then the company should set that as a limit and people will use it.

Saying "you can use as much as you want but don't use too much or you'll get in trouble" is obviously confusing and is going to result in most people barely using it

Imo it's almost the other way around.

If you just want mediocre code that technically meets the requirements of a Jira ticket bashed out as cheaply as possible, an LLM can do that, you no longer need to hire a junior offshore to save money

Jaguar Land Rover didn't go bust (yet) but they had to shut down production in the UK for months following a cyber attack.

Very much a material impact on the bottom line and share price

No it comes from spending a lot of time in my home country (the UK), which despite nominally being a parliamentary democracy is very clearly run by a small number of (largely unelected) people at the top.

The same as every company I've ever worked for, large or small.

Some systems obfuscate it more than others, but at the end of the day somebody has to have the executive power to make a decision when the chips are down, or you just have chaos

It simply can't work, somebody ultimately has to be in charge of a 15 person startup, it is literally impossible to run a country via committee

Best science fiction book ever written IMO

Continuing to believe in democracy when you seem to know how the country (all countries) actually works in practice is surely just illogical.

You can't vote for anyone who'll abolish the FBI, CIA and the rest of the elite groups that actually run things

Zero trust ≠ publicly accessible.

And zero trust makes sense, once one service behind a VPN is compromised attackers can potentially move laterally, zero trust mitigates that

Blindly running client side code (within a very carefully designed sandbox) is necessary for the modern web to operate, and people like the modern web.

We aren't going back to a page refresh every time you want to update something any time soon

There are examples of the apparently ineffective British state suddenly gaining some teeth and some competence when they actually care.

One example is after the Southport riots, miraculously the justice system became hyperefficient and the perpetrators were found, arrested, charged and jailed within a week.

That suggests a lot of what looks like incompetence (potholes, petty crime, maybe also this) is actually just the state not really caring about a lot of issues.

If they decide they really care about internet censorship, I wouldn't rule out them suddenly becoming a lot more competent in that specific area

Getting the raw data is relatively straightforward, but my understanding is doing real time DPI at country scale without being easily circumvented (and without breaking the rest of the internet you want to work) isn't so easy.

If you want to really make sure nobody in the uk can easily access 4chan (PRC style) it needs some effort, and you're in an arms race with attempts to mask/tunnel traffic so it gets through

I think it’s an open question whether the British state has the technical chops, money and willingness to implement a Great Firewall type solution.

The state isn’t totally incompetent but doing it properly would be a serious undertaking, the kind of thing where the recent track record of big government tech projects isn’t great

True for bitcoin but Monero is legitimately quite anonymous

I don't have an agenda, I just don't really believe in democracy.

There's very little evidence to support the idea that ordinary people vote for what they want and therefore control the direction of the state, in the UK or any other "democratic" country.

If that were the case then why are policies consistently implemented that go against the expressed desires of the majority of the population?

Every government in every state ever is more accurately described as a regime, for me it's a morally neutral term.

The only question is whether the regime is good or not

Also BTC has a very conservative 10 minute block time that protects to some extent against a network partition (there is time to recover)

The UK population is generally docile, we don't really riot even when things are bad (unlike the French who barely need an excuse).

Our elites are pretty bad at running the country but actually quite crafty when it comes to managing dissent and channeling it into things that don't threaten their hold on power.

So the regime can get away with a lot, there is no organised violent resistance

Yes, but the complexity of the setup (which is already way too much for any non-cypherpunk normies) is starting to get kind of ridiculous.

I am still pro crypto and fascinated by the technology but we have to admit the original cypherpunk vision was unfortunately never going to work, we're going to end up with something else

Say you've done everything right and used 3 coldcards spread across 3 geographic locations using 2of3 multisig.

You're feeling pretty proud of yourself, your coins are super safe.

Then it turns out the RNG in the coldcard mk2 was badly/maliciously implemented and is completely insecure. You need to move your coins right now.

You can probably see the issue

Core banking may be more resilient because it runs on software that's so antique and obscure it's not going to be easy to find the code to attack.

Also banks are more likely to take basic security seriously and not leave core services open to the public internet, even if the code itself is full of bugs.

On the other hand, running old software where the code is publicly available, on hardware connected to the internet - you are cooked

In reality though you can easily lose your job in the UK over stuff like this if a kid/parent complains so teachers are afraid to use any force at all.

What the law says on paper is one thing, who the school administration will believe and back up is another

Then you ssh into an instance and have to remember how bash/sh work

There are always hype train/resume driven development developers (in fact, there's way too many).

I wish it were otherwise but I don't think anyone running a hype-driven project of dubious utility needs to worry too much, humans are not rational creatures

Yeah this is it, Bun, Deno etc are 100% good for JS/TS in the aggregate because they push Node.js and npm to actually improve.

However that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use them, it is not

Still not necessarily wise to voluntarily escalate an air war when you have very little air defence. But hey what do I know

I think it will happen, like you say switching is easy and the only possible moat is to build a better model than your competitors at enormous expense.

They’re all stuck in a cycle of spending huge amounts of money on training just to stand still (in business terms).

In the long run, it can’t continue because it doesn’t make any sense

Yeah it makes sense, but ultimately the only thing that creates any form of lock in is the chat history and memories, and that isn’t super important, it’s not a real network effect like a social media app or a taxi app.

Having a better model is the only real moat, without that inference is a commodity

Or just: you have a family, including children who need you to be a responsible adult first thing in the morning (every morning) whether you like it or not

Yes network effects are significantly less than something like Uber, in fact they’re almost nonexistent

Hard to enforce when you’re dealing with private companies with “creative” accounting - who’s to say what the actual cost of inference is for OpenAI or Anthropic?

Possibly they don’t even really know themselves at this point, although obviously is it significantly higher than the consumer subscription price

It is a protected title in some countries but not the UK (and I don’t think the US either?).

I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body?

So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term