I think open source does not need to embrace AI coding, it needs to apply extra scrutiny to it otherwise it will become slop.

well, at my current job they use NoSQL, in this case it's DynamoDB and it's been frustrating at times. So I asked the question: why are we dealing with these problems day in, day out, if the problems we're trying to solve have been solved half a century ago with SQL?

The answer is cost. The way we access data may be convenient to do with SQL, but it's also expensive. We have big (not webscale but large) volumes of data coming in every day. Having this on SQL would cost us tens of thousands a month. Keeping it in DynamoDB costs us a few hundred. And it's stupidly fast - if we wanted to get that kind of performance from SQL we'd have to pay for a supercharged overprovisioned server.

And honestly it's been fun. It's turned "boring business software development" back into more of an engineering problem.

I see the problem as a more "get off my lawn" types here. They have fully adopted "vibe coding" as "anything made with AI assistance" as much as older people call anyone younger than them "millennials".

There's a big difference between an experienced programmer providing the AI with clear, concise prompts and guidance; than having someone with zero knowledge trying to build an entire app from scratch.

One is "augmented capabilities", the other is vibe coding. But the haters here just refuse ANY sort of AI involvement.

My house is a relatively normal size (1800 square feet), and it still takes more than three full minutes for water in my shower to reach full temperature when I run it straight hot. If I also turn on both faucets in my bathroom, I can get that down to about twenty or thirty seconds, which is barely tolerable.

At my mom's house in Tennessee, the distance the water has to travel is comparable, but it takes only ten seconds or so.

It's a huge downside to all the water-saving showerheads and faucets that were forced upon us here in California decades ago. We waste a lot of time and energy to make up for a water shortage that exists only because of decades of politicians being short-sighted and kicking the desalination can down the road over and over so that the money doesn't get spent on their watch.

Translation: A company that has the potential to benefit from regulation by squeezing out competitors wants more regulation.

I'm not saying they're not right, just that it seems awfully convenient for a company specializing in pumps that recirculate data center water to want efficiency regulations that would push customers towards their most efficient (and thus presumably most high-margin) pumps.

Instead of having your hot water fan out in a tree, you wire it like a token ring with a return pipe, where each faucet only has a short bit of pipe between it and the ring. Then, you have a pump to circulate hot water through the ring-shaped pipe network. That way, it takes half a second to get hot water instead of half a minute or more.

Sure. I'd imagine most hardware vendors will want it. I'm just saying that the wording, at least as described in the summary, is... problematic at best.

Not really. It's more like requiring all vendors who sell cash registers used in restaurants to support checking photo IDs because some restaurants also serve alcohol.

There's no safe way to prove your age to a website. Any scheme requires trusting some arbitrary third party that could secretly be the government doing timing comparisons between the verification and DNS queries and stuff to unmask anonymous users. At least with operating system or browser vendors, they presumably have a strong commitment to minimizing the risk of someone publicly posting "John Doe just visited sexwithseaturtles.com" or whatever.

It's not really that terrible. If you're going to do age verification, you have two choices: browser or operating system. All else is all but guaranteed to be either a privacy disaster, a usability disaster, or both. And either way, every operating system needs to support multiple users, or the "I used dad's iPad to browse porn and buy firearms" problem makes the verification useless.

And major operating system or browser vendors that cater to the general public should make it available by default, because doing so prevents the "You downloaded the AdultCheck module, so you must be a pervert" logic that some people might use to attack people.

What's terrible is the idea of mandating that it be performed at the OS level, rather than just mandating that the OS doesn't get in the way. Browser-level verification is actually far preferable, because there's no need to bake that into an authentication framework when you can just send it out to a browser window. Leave that tiny bit of integration complexity to the companies that actually require it. But this only works if the OS supports multiple users, so that the browser's cookies and storage are not shared across multiple users.

For devices that don't have multiple users, baking it in at the OS level really is the only way, but it could just as easily be solved by baking it in at the browser level and changing the OS to allow multiple users per device. Unfortunately, such technical details are way too subtle a point for most lawmakers to understand, so obviously they did it in the most wrong way possible.

Wait 'til they realize that Android is distributed under a license that allows people to copy, redistribute, and modify it.

As usual, a law created by people who didn't think of the consequences then got modified to fix some of the worst consequences, but because they still did not think of the consequences, the modification created different consequences. And this is why we need better lawmakers.

They actually do both, they're known to use their Manna-clone system that orders warehouse workers around to "find problems" with the performance of anyone involved in unionizing and fire them as an early line of defense. They've done this with unionization attempts in the US before (at least one of those warehouses did successfully unionize despite that). Shutting down the FC and moving out of town is their nuke-it-from-orbit option when all else has failed.

Penalties are light and unlikely enough in many jurisdictions for employers to consider it a cost of doing business though. See what Amazon's been doing in their warehouses in Quebec and BC for examples. Coincidentally, guess which Canadian provinces have the most videogame dev studios...

Maybe a system where everyone gets a share of collective productivity but has to take a turn at work could make those people feel better. So everyone gets their lifetime supply of food/shelter/healthcare/transportation/entertainment in return for their 5-10 years working or whatever the economy actually needs, so there's no shortage of human labor and nobody feels that there's an unfair division of labor either.

Of course the problem with that is another problem contributing to the current situation, there are people who seek maximally unequal shares of wealth for themselves and would fight an egalitarian utopia tooth and nail. Rich and powerful people who can contribute to the 10,000 year old effort of tricking the proles into propping up the aristocracy.

It's not the worst idea ever but it's worse than better options the billionaires want to distract us from with discussion of UBI, like universal basic services and democratic socialism, ideas where they don't retain as much of their wealth and power as they might with UBI.