for the illegal tariffs to be struck down.

Literally all of what I described are exactly the sorts of tricks corporations pay to work around taxes. And in general, they're better at finding loopholes than governments are at closing loopholes. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that it's likely to be way, way, WAY harder to pull off than you think, at least when it comes to subscription-based streaming services.

Plus there's not a sale when you're doing subscription-based streaming. It is no different than going to another country and watching it and coming back with the memory of having watched it in a theater, minus the actual travel, plus the pixels having briefly appeared on a screen somewhere else. Most people will balk at paying tariffs without actually having something in the end for their troubles.

Well, that's great then. I pay for a subscription. I pay nothing extra for the imported content. So no tariff.

But wait, the subscription is from a foreign company. Why isn't anyone paying taxes on this? We should tax it all because the company is foreign.

Ah, now the company has an in-country subsidiary, and you're paying that company. And suddenly the fees are no longer taxed. Instead, the content that comes from overseas is taxed. But the in-country company pays a licensing fee that is an infinitesimal fraction of the subscription fee that you pay. Then, they pay a huge "trademark licensing fee" for the use of the Netflix/Hulu/Paramount Plus/* name, so that nearly all of the money you pay for your subscription goes to the parent company untaxed.

Good luck sorting it all out and proving that they're violating the law.

So no, for entirely virtual goods and intellectual property, it's almost never that simple. In fact, it is ridiculously hard, and enforcement is downright nightmarish. The term "Hollywood accounting" didn't become a household term for no reason.

I'm just talking about statistical patterns. I know little about Microsoft patches. I abandoned Windows in 2001, right around the time XP was released, and have never looked back.

Not remotely similar to my experience. Granted I'm writing Rust, and the Rust compiler is *really* picky, so by the time the agent gets something that compiles it's a lot closer to correct than in other languages. Particularly if you know how to use the type system to enforce correctness.

Yes, you have to know how to write tests. A few decades of experience helps a lot. I find I actually spend a lot more time focused on the details of APIs and data structures than the details of tests, though. Getting APIs or data structures wrong will cost you down the road.

Also, I suppose it helps a bit that my work is in cryptography (protocols, not algorithms). The great thing about crypto code is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all. If you screw up the business logic just a little bit, you get completely wrong answers. The terrible thing is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all and gives you no clue where your problem might be.

Of course that's just functional correctness. With cryptography, the really hard part is making sure that the implementation is actually secure. The AI can't help much with that. That requires lots of knowledge and lots of experience.

Deep experience is absolutely required. My antennas are quite good after 40 years.

You really have to know what questions to ask, and what answers not to accept. It also helps to know what kinds of errors the LLM makes. It never outright lies, but it will guess rather than look, so you have to know when and how to push it, and how to manage its context window. When stuff starts falling out of the context window the machine starts guessing, approximating, justifying. Sometimes this means you need to make it spawn a bunch of focused subagents each responsible for a small piece of the problem. There are a lot of techniques to learn to maximize the benefit and minimize the errors.

Yeah, I am definitely not doing UI work.

Speak for yourself. I wrote Android's Keymaster implementation in less than a month, and it was about that size, and then re-wrote most of it in a week when it turned out I'd made some core assumptions that Qualcomm couldn't match in their implementation. It was relatively bug-free for a decade -- even when a third-party security research lab spent a month scrutinizing it. They found a handful of things, but nothing serious. I was amazed, especially since I'd seen the reports they turned in on some other code.

That's just one example. In my nearly 40-year career I've had a half dozen crazy-productive weeks like that, and usually when working on particularly-complex bits. If you haven't had that experience, that's unfortunate. It's not something I could do frequently (or would want to), but it's a glorious feeling when you're that deep in the zone.

Headline to read "United States Massively Raises Tariffs, Shocked When World Refuses To Not Tax U.S. Digital Exports".

Some things are entirely predictable.

Mostly infeasibility. Taxing streaming means assigning a value to the content and sending someone a bill for the taxes, or else finding a way to absorb the taxes, and in any case, are you importing when they watch it, or when Netflix (or whoever) imports it onto their servers?

Once VPNs exist, it becomes impossible for a law like this to be enforced without enforcing strict age verification around the world, which is impossible given the technological state of many countries in the world (including the United States). It isn't even possible for companies to reliably comply with a law like this by blocking all access from Australia (because VPNs exist).

Once again, dumb legislators who don't understand technology have passed laws demanding something that is technologically infeasible (bans) instead of something that is technologically feasible (providing special accounts for underage people that give parental supervision, blaming the user if the user deliberately goes around that, and encouraging parents to report when their kids make friends with other kids who use fake ages to go around that).

The result, predictably, is that it doesn't work. And everyone who has ever worked in the tech industry is shocked in much the same way that we are shocked when the sun comes up in the morning, despite us demanding that it not come up until noon.

That surprised me, too. TypeScript is a very poorly-congealed ("designed" seems a bit strong) language.

Of the two popular scripting languages - python and ruby - python probably makes more sense as you can compile into actual binaries if you want.

For speed and parallel processing, which I'd assume they'd want, they'd be better off with Tcl or Erlang, both of which are much much better suited to this sort of work.

Then they should have used Tcl.

Not really. These sorts of tests are all stochastic. Your prescription makes science sound binary, i.e., if one assumption is wrong, then it is all wrong. But one if one assumption is x .0095, when evaluating the gloves too means your assumption is x .0096. That means your numbers might need to be adjusted a bit, but, depending upon the math and model, it may not be a radical adjustment; just an adjustment at the margins.

Reagan was on a privatization kick. It resulted in wonderful growth for the Beltway Bandits. Another reason privatization does not work for government is because government is not private enterprise that can decide what markets to enter and which to exit. Programs are mandated by law. Sure laws can change but it is a long arduous path. And you wouldn't want it any other way. Changing things on a whim has brought current U.S. to its knees, and the damage appears to be long lasting.

Want to see privatization at work? Look at the U.S. health system. Those insurance companies use actuaries to determine who gets covered. A good team of actuaries can put a price on your grandmother and her cat and will if you ask them to. As a consequence, we have a health system which can send you to the poor house in under a year because of a medical condition.

DoD is one of the largest organizations on the planet. Saying their failure to pass 8 audits in a row ignores the scale of the problem. First off, it was never built to be audited. The idea of auditing DoD is just like DoD telling a contractor to add this extra special whizzy to their weapons system after it had already been built. It has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort to corral systems that were never built with auditing in mind into sysrtems that can be audited. And those systems are not stand alone, they all interact.

Then the question come up of what software will you use to audit a system this large and complex. They chose SAPs software (for the most part). Ever interact with SAP's ERP? Hell is more welcoming. They chose SAP because no other system was big enough. Oracle is for babies. MS? (okay, stop laughing). In addition, Congress keep mandating new requirements. And new systems are constantly being brought on line and old ones retired. It is like changing a plane's internal mechanisms while it is flying. Ever try to hit a moving target of an engineered system while keeping the system up and running? If you answer no, you do not understand the scope of the problem.

There's no freezing DoD in place so you can perform an audit on it. It is constantly changing. To make matters worse, Congress and Administrations keep changing. Their priorities keep changing. Meanwhile, you must be sure to keep DoD's job of defense up-to-date, and offense must be kept up-to-day as well.

Best isn't the question. Sales is the question. If you do a poll of photographers, the names you'll hear when you ask what they shoot with are almost always going to be Lexar and SanDisk. Sony won't be in the top five. IMO, that's mostly because they spent a decade with their own Memory Stick nonsense while other manufacturers were claiming the SD and CF card market for themselves. It's hard to force your way into an already crowded field where everyone has already picked favorites.