I assume they have no way to track your sales back to this system via whoever else in government you sold to. Defaulting to "nothing" is not reliable because maybe you did and they want to know whether this whole thing is really making any difference.
I think the correct way would be a one-click link in an email though!
I also think the UK are very tight with money (not sure about other countries). There are lots of people, according to our local Clarks shoe shop, who get their feet measured and then just buy their shoes online to save a few pounds. People do the same with anything they can try on in the shop and then order the same thing somewhere online for a bit cheaper.
The things you said are definitely making things much worse and I suspect that even back in the day when everyone bought things from the local shop, most retailers were not making massive profits so anything cutting away at that will make it worse.
Serious question: If there are so many LLMs on online forums, who is doing it? Is it just 1000s of research students or something more nefarious? Is it AI businesses building up evidence that their output is as highly scored as humans therefore "buy our software"?
We're in the middle of an active cold war where countries are trying to manipulate the citizens of rival countries to destroy their civilization without having to fire a single bullet. Anonymous, over the internet mass manipulation, all for some minimal electricity cost.
If Russia is willing to spend cash like that, then of course they're willing to run massive bot farms to pollute any forums they can. I'd be shocked if the US was not doing the same in any way they can. You have to ask why Trump killed Radio Free America as well when it was clearly not an big expense.
Not sure how this relates to the subject in a direct way. Radio Free America was a outlet explicitly created and utilized to spread US propaganda, but kinda sorta barely disguised as a journalistic enterprise (not really, if you were listening to RFA you knew what you were listening to.) Shutting it down seems to be a counterpoint to all of the covert participation of US intelligence on the web which has done nothing but escalate.
It was a head scratching decision that few believe was for the stated reason. Other countries are ramping up their propaganda arms while Trump shut down part of the US'. The reasoning was cost, but that doesn't make a lot of sense in the grand scheme of things. Foil hat types would easily believe it was the puppet doing the bidding of the one that pulls the strings. RFA has been a thorn in despots' side for a long time.
> You have to ask why Trump killed Radio Free America as well when it was clearly not an big expense.
The obvious answer to that question is "because he's a Russian asset". But that doesn't mean the obvious answer is also the correct one.
IMHO, we're seeing another and much more concerning trend at play here... the utter and complete rejection of anything but violence by the far-right. Diplomacy? Development aid? Cultural exchange? All sorts of soft power have been under attack for decades now, and not just by the far-right but (especially when it comes to development aid) also by mainstream centrist parties across the Western world. And it's always pseudo-masculine / "strongman" BS backing the sentiment - Bernd Höcke, German AfD mastermind, comes to my mind with "we have to rediscover our masculinity" [1], so do Hungary's Viktor Orban and his denouncement of LGBT or Trump's entire Œuvre.
I'm not saying that violence or at least being prepared, ready and willing to use it is automatically bad. Far from it. But all the various forms of "soft power"? They have a lot of value, value that the far-right is all too willing to just burn for entertainment.
wouldnt it be more productive to talk about the systemic framework leading to this inflamed state of affairs, and ways that we can tackle the issue on the ground level? perhaps inhabitants of the west would prefer pseudo masculinity to another few decades of migrant influx without corresponding upgrades to social infrastructure. this sort of internal struggle would provide a ripe substrate for foreign agents to perform subterfuge, especially in a screen based world where the narrative can be remotely influenced. conclusively, the population has been convinced that voting far right is the correct decision in their favor, but the question remains, who is it really in favor of? call me a centrist all you like but members of my family were executed under communist regimes so i find it pointless focusing on one side of yin/yang here (in other words, extremists are violent regardless as to their political persuasions).
It's very common for folks to search Reddit to find reviews of products etc. these days. If you can have a bot account post a fake review of how awesome your product us, and have that upvoted, it can pay huge dividends.
I've noticed 4 categories of inauthentic users. Ranked by my perceived prevalence:
Account farmers: these can be people in 3rd world countries automated/not automated. Can be using hundreds of mobile phones to create accounts and do daily activity to make the account look legitimate. While they're building an activity history they are also being paid to like/follow/interact with content.
Advertisers: these are brought accounts that are used to pose inauthentic reviews of their service and inject it into discussion and to do PR
Sloppers: people who build AI pipelines and then just pump the most dogshit content directly into a platform trying to make any amount of money.
Nation State propaganda arms: These accounts build a narrative character and then join discussion pushing a certain narrative, boost real content creators who share their message and bog down discussion.
There are many reasons for influence campaigns, that isn't new. Influencing the public is incredible valuable; that's why so many invest so much in it. LLMs automate it like never before.
Plain advertising, governments' propaganda, political propaganda for one group or another to shift public opinion (it's done on TV networks, why would they not do online campaigns?), astroturfing by corporations promoting acceptance or fighting negative news (e.g. rideshare, AI, whatever certain wealthy personalities are doing) ... the list goes on.
HN has always been relatively influential in the tech industry and therefore worth influencing, and now the cost is very cheap - you don't even need to hire many people, so less-resourced operators will find it worthwhile (and they will also attack lower-value forums).
I think some of it is account farming, but some is just people buying wholesale into the idea that if you're not using AI for everything, you're gonna be left behind. On the Kagi Small Web list, there's plenty of hobby blogs that used to be normal pre-2023 and are now obviously LLM-written and AI-illustrated. There's also plenty of people on LinkedIn who post AI slop because they think it helps them build a "professional brand". I even have some distant friends who are using AI for responding to friend & family posts on Facebook just because it makes you seem... smart? engaged? I don't know.
It's actively encouraged by some of the platforms too. In Gmail and Google Docs, you have incessant AI prompts along the lines of "help me write this". I think LinkedIn does the same.
If you farm a fleet of good accounts, you control the discourse. On HN, you could boost whatever you're trying to push, and downvote or flagkill whoever objects.
There are obvious benefits to controlling public discourse, right? Even if it's just to support some project you're working on.
I've been more disturbed by comments that were flagkilled just for being wrongthink, not because they were rude or not well argued. I've also seen a lot less of those flagkills over the last 6 months, which makes me feel like there were some fake accounts that got caught and culled.
In the recent thread about life in a class war, a lot of comments in different places saying that if we don't fix this inequality problem, g-tines might come back, and every single one of them was flagkilled, no matter whether it framed as "we have to get out the g-tines" or "we have to fix this, otherwise psychopaths will get out the g-tines" or "thank god we've become civilized enough that we don't get the g-tines out"
In the case of Reddit and HN a lot of it is done by businesses either blatantly advertising themselves or building up the karma they need to effectively do so. I recall reading obviously AI generated replies to news articles written by accounts associated with businesses related to the events in the news. This isn't new in the LLM era. Hobby subreddits are well known to be always full of businesses selling hobby gears and items doing self promotion. It's just that now it is a lot more obvious because of the AI text smell.
That, and probably political astroturfing. Before every election my local subreddit sees a surge of crime stories. Go figure.
People like the above poster who are "just running an experiment" or "trying something for fun" who then wonder why online communities are full of AI now.
Lots of marketing. Not even AI business, just regular consumer crap. They realized that blatantly spamming their product looks bad, so they orchestrate multiple accounts to look more organic. And people actually engage with it.
The scary thing for me is that in the US, the President and by extension the DoJ has a lot of power to override any legal protections that exist in most countries. In the UK, the Prime Minister or the Home Office cannot ring up any of the enforcement agencies and tell them to drop a corruption case - the law is supposed to apply to everyone.
In the US, for some reason, if you are a danger to the President's friends, you can be fired/your department can just be shutdown executively and this isn't just about Trump, it is about a serious weakness in the systems of governance.
> In the UK, the Prime Minister or the Home Office cannot ring up any of the enforcement agencies and tell them to drop a corruption case - the law is supposed to apply to everyone.
I would not rely on that. The Attorney General can withdraw prosecutions, and is a government minister (although not technically in the Cabinet).
Parliament can do anything, it just usually doesn't. This includes retroactive legislation to decide that you did not win a lawsuit that you actually did win (Reilly and Wilson v Secretary of State, although that itself was eventually ruled unlawful). The infinite delay of Bloody Sunday prosecutions is probably the biggest example in UK discourse.
No country is safe from this if enough authoritarian-collaborator political appointments are made (such as happened to SCOTUS). It should really be viewed as a form of coup.
Yep; I think the above comment took the wrong lessons.
What actually happened in the US is that "common norms and expectations" were thrown out the window, so instead of the question being "What is traditionally done?" it became "What can legally be done?" And, as it turns out, when you're only constrained by the letter of the law the executive branch is insanely powerful.
UK politics, more than most younger countries, is particularly susceptible to this. Norms, traditionally, and commonly understood standards make up a scary amount of constraints on the powers of government. If anyone gained power that only feels limited by the letter of the law (i.e. throws out norms, traditions, and standards), the UK is in serious trouble and Parliament hasn't moved to address it.
Somewhat ironically (given how unpopular it is), the Lords may be the best back-stop the UK has. Particularly the 30%~ which do not originate from politics.
People in the US have been bemoaning the ceding of power of Congress to the Executive branch for a long time. I think what's happening now is validating that rights laws are all subject to the whims of the people in power. There is nothing keeping Congress from reasserting their power and getting a grip over things, but they won't for the political risks involved. Heads would roll, nobody wants to be one of them.
> And, as it turns out, when you're only constrained by the letter of the law the executive branch is insanely powerful.
It's not even constrained by the letter of the law. The current administration has done quite a few things which are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.
Trump has done so, safe in the knowledge that the impeachment process can't work so long as the Republican party holds a majority in the House, and a conviction can't occur so long as the Republican party controls at least 41 seats in the Senate.
Furthermore, due to the presidential immunity power created out of thin air by the Supreme Court in US v. Trump, he is shielded even from investigation so long as it can be successfully argued any potential crimes were done as part of official duties.
Lastly, his advanced age virtually guarantees he'll die long before any such prosecution could clear the legal hoops required for conviction after leaving office (assuming he ever does), even in the rare circumstances a Democrat could be found with enough spine to actually move forward with one.
Funny that I just saw this after have "Console temporarily unavailable". I am currently at the stage that: 1) I think Claude Code is very impressive 2) I think pretty much everything else about them is terrible.
* Support really poor, raised a ticket last week and have heard nothing back at all
* Separation of claude.ai accounts and console accounts is super confusing
* Couldn't log into the platform since I had an old org in the process of deletion even though I was invited to a new one (had to wait 7 days!)
* Payments for more API credits were broken for about a week
* Claude chat has really gone to s*t unless it always was. Just getting back terrible answers to simple questions.
* The desktop app is a web app pretending to be a desktop app that doesn't always know it is a desktop app so you get things like, "this will only work in the desktop app". Yes I know, this is the desktop app! "Oh sorry about that but you need to use the desktop app".
* mcp integration and debugging is dreadful, just a combination of generic "an error ocurred" and sometimes nothing at all
* MCP only supports OAuth for shared connectors but auth key doesn't work even with "local" servers that are not necessarily local, just the config is local.
It's apparently not even possible to get a tax exemption if you work at a place exempt from state taxes. Some institutions are sticklers about this and will refuse to allow payments.
yeah the desktop app forgets it's the desktop app. claude code feels local right up until the api starts coughing up 500s. same thing, just in a terminal instead of a window.
I think new founders are sometimes intimidated by customers, especially well-known brands, we don't want to upset or annoy them instead of being open about not being able to afford to run loads of pre-sales technical work. We also see the dollar signs for one large customer when we should be seeing smaller dollar signs for many customers.
For the customers, to be fair, they are partly trying to derisk the purchasing decision by making sure everyone and their dog has seen the demo, shown that it definitely does exactly what they want with their data and processes etc. and they have no skin in the game at this point, so why not?
Believe in the product you have built already and as the OP says, be certain of product market fit and ABC (always be closing).
Been through this many times. Have no problems and then all of a sudden, servers get blocked, same misleading error message about it being temporary, same annoying auto response that "we cannot see anything wrong" and same opaque customer services that won't tell you anything.
They even have the cheek to link to a 15 year old guide on email best-practices, it is in equal parts awkward, annoying and incredibly shameful for a large organisation like MS. The fact that SNDS shows all greens seems to mean nothing and clearly they have been instructed not to engage in any conversation about why it is happening and the fact these are servers that are linked to a well-known business with static IPs that have been in use for over 3 years.
The best I can work out is the use of heuristic mail filters that detect anomolies for whatever reason they feel like. Too much email, not enough email, email sending rates that are too erratic, basically what 99.9% of email servers in the world are doing and they decide to block you. I could live with "rate limited" and I could live with "temporary" because I would disable the servers once they got blocked but nope. Just more "we don't give a shit" attitude from Microsoft.
Sadly, I had to accept the inevitable which I had avoided for many years and migrate all of our email sending to Amazon SES because life is too short to send emails to Microsoft.
In my experience, the Puffin crossings are setup correctly precisely 0% of the time.
If you are going to pay presumably a lot more money for all of the extra detectors and electronics then they need to deliver 2 things as mentioned by OP: 1) They make sure that anyone on the crossing has time to cross rather than stopping traffic for a fixed amount of time (useful outside schools) and 2) If there aren't any people crossing, the traffic should be stopped for a short amount of time no worse than if they were just a normal Pelican crossing.
However.
Even when no-one is crossing or in some case someone crossed and is about 50 metres up the road, the crossings are still usually on red for a total of often 20 seconds, which is way longer than most Pelican crossings that are on red for usually 5 to 10 seconds max.
I don't know if no-one notices or cares but it is really annoying!
My biggest annoyance are the ones that wait for a gap in the traffic. And by the time it goes green you have already crossed. They seem to be configured to be irrelevant for any able bodied person. And completely ignore current traffic conditions in favour of some hard coded delays.
Most around me seem to be in this mode. The traffic crawls past at pedestrian speed whilst a steadily growing group waiting to cross stand in vehicle fumes. There's a pretty clear principle here of flow conservation. If the light stopping traffic does not reduce overall flow then the light should change for pedestrians immediately. If the traffic flow is low, then a small reservoir is built up which clears immediately. If the flow is slow and saturated the gap that opens up can be refilled quickly. The flow range where the change actually impacts local vehicle flow is rather narrow (high, but not too high). Of course there are second order effects at associated junctions, but at that point maybe the first order interests of pedestrians should be prioritised.
A lot of misunderstanding here about "why would you invest in someone who has failed?"
An investor is a gambler. Not just on past success, although I'm sure Marissa has had some successes even if people don't know them.
They gamble on:
1) Has this person got the experience (good or bad) to run a business. A failed business leader is a better gamble than someone with no experience.
2) Does this person have a strong network so they can realistically pull in some really good people?
3) Has this person raised capital before?
4) Do they have a convincing narrative about why they have failed and what they might do differently?
5) Is the potential ROI high?
6) Do I have anything else I could invest in instead with better odds?
If I think as an Investor and not as an Engineer, I am not surprised that she has succeeded and I wish her all the best.
e.g. VCs invest in startups commercializing open-source foundational/infrastructure projects not only for the financial RoI, but also because it helps their portfolio companies succeed faster while maintaining a smaller headcount or spending less on non-core R&D.
I find a lot of these articles conflate two issues, which I have seen mentioned in some of the other comments.
1) There are objectively bad decisions that you can make regardless of "taste" or principles. If you search a list in O(n) for an items key, it is objectively worse than using a dictionary with O(1) search in most cases. It is not about taste or readability, there is a right way and a wrong way (or multiple right ways and multiple wrong ones).
2) Everything else is a matter of trade-offs. Map reduce or a loop? It depends entirely on performance requirements, what reads better in a specific scenario, maybe browser compatability or whatever but as long as the trade-offs are considered, I won't get bitchy to another Dev who decides that one is better than the other although I might disagree.
If something is wrong or the trade-offs haven't been considered though, that is a question of maintenance: do we care enough, is the performance bad enough, is the code visited enough to change it? In a lot of cases, the app will be deleted before it becomes a problem but it is still a question of trade-offs.
As someone said below, as long as someone has considered the "why" then its all fair game. I'm not sure that any of this is "taste" though.
I think the correct way would be a one-click link in an email though!
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