There's a pretty significant difference there, even in some of the examples you picked to make your point. TCP and HTTP are well defined standards that, for all their flaws, were designed and conceived to be useful abstractions that you didn't need to understand deeply in order to use. The things that LLMs allow novices to skip nowadays aren't designed with that in mind, and generally aren't something you can just skip over without getting yourself into hot water later. If you mess up Stripe or Auth0 setup because you don't understand the implications of the boilerplate the LLM spit out, you can very easily get your whole app compromised or end up on the hook for a lot of fraudulent credit card charges, etc.
I see the point you're making and I don't entirely disagree, but I think current iterations of LLM coding tools still make it far too easy for beginners (or even fairly experienced engineers) to convince themselves that a detail falls into the former category of abstractions they can safely skip understanding, when they're very much the latter.
I'm now pretty convinced that this is the best argument for persuading non-technical and non-internet-privacy minded people why this is a problem. It's hard to explain all the technical factors that make it impossible to implement without compromising privacy... but it's pretty easy to get them to understand the real intent. If you start them thinking through what mechanisms would make sense _if_ the original premise truly was protecting kids from content they aren't ready to see, it's easy to arrive at that answer, and equally easy to see why "everyone must provide their ID so we can verify their age" probably comes from other motivations.
and that's as useful as self-documenting "i am over 18" or "over 21" for things that require that, without any document checks.
this is a way to get something legal on paper, the rest of the stuff (patches, if you will) comes later. This asserts that age is important enough to force an operating system to comply, this opens the door.
> and that's as useful as self-documenting "i am over 18" or "over 21" for things that require that, without any document checks.
No OS I'm aware of allows non-admin users to add new users to the system. Parents that care about these sorts of things don't give their kids admin access to their computers.
> the rest of the stuff (patches, if you will) comes later.
Unless the legislation allows for such patches through non-legislative process, patches to legislation generally happens on a ~20 year cycle in my experience.
Maybe. I give kids more credit than most people on here, i guess. All it takes is one moment for the kids to see the password, guess the password, or whatever. if there's a physical key involved, parents sleep.
A determined kid will find a weakness in the pursuit of freedom.
also nintendo's OS lets users add users to their heart's content. At least i haven't found a way to stop a toddler from adding 6 avatars....
All I claimed is that as passed it is more effective than a "check this box if you're over 21" on forms. Not that it was fool-proof. I don't think any legislation would be fool-proof. Certainly not the privacy-destroying "upload your ID", which this isn't.
You can't add Nintendo Online accounts without being the account owner. I have a Nintendo family plan, I'm the only person that can add or remove accounts to the online access service, and i decide whether each account is an adult or a child. For offline accounts like kids can make locally, its obviously irrelevant
I only got hallucinations of random combinations of my (fairly unique) last name & first names that do not exist, combined with very accomplished and completely fictional biographies. I guess I'm not notable enough which is somewhat comforting.
Maybe I shouldn't. But then I have to deep-dive into yet another flagrant cheap hallucination. You see, when a molecule oxidize, it becomes a different molecule.
It is impossible for a benzoquinone to oxidize, yet remain a benzoquinone. There are just two of them [1], and the two are isomers [2]. Transforming one into another would be isomerisation, not oxidation.
Not to mention — "oxidize on contact with air" is such a pile of nonsense. Just look at those things: benzene ring with a couple of oxygens sticking from it. [1] That stuff is pretty darn stable in presence of atmospheric oxygen.
All the major metro areas on the Acela corridor are also on a straight line, on significantly flatter land than Japan. Notice how the Acela never spends 10+ minute periods in long, deep tunnels under mountain ranges. The Acela primarily spends most of the trip going below 100 mph because it is operating on 100+ year old infrastructure that has only ever been upgraded piecemeal as it starts to fail.
It's always feels funny to me when taking the Acela between Boston and NYC that you go screaming along at 150mph... for a small portion of track in Rhode Island. The rest of the time you're going much slower. It's almost like, why even bother for that small section?
The Shinkansen was a very different experience when I took it.
I think a big part of it is also that (partly because of the necessity of building for earthquake resistance), Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors. Actually, it's most of the rest of the world, except the US.
> Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors.
This must be a different Japan than the one I'm familiar with, where exterior walls are often uninsulated and only a few inches thick and single-pane windows are still the norm in a lot of housing. I wouldn't be surprised if soundproofing were better for railroad-adjacent buildings, but compared to American homes the soundproofing here is surprisingly poor.
> Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors.
Oh, you’re definitely engaging in Magical Japan, here.
While building standards have certainly improved in the past 20 years, the average Japanese house is built just strong enough not to fall over when someone farts. In particular, windows tend to be single pane, and you’re lucky if they block a strong wind, let alone noise.
As the sister comment said - the houses are just strong enough not to fall over in a "normal", all-the-time earthquake. Our house sways a lot under typhoons and far-away earthquakes (far away = long wavelengths). It's only relatively recent that building codes have been updated to handle real earthquakes without falling over like a house of cards. Remember the Noto earthquake Januar 1, 2024? Large areas didn't have a single house still standing.
(Which is why we're now tearing down our old house and building a new, stronger one. Post-war Japan was more concerned with a) building a lot of houses, and b) keep lots of jobs, which meant, as far as houses were concerned, building use-and-throw-away houses. Then build another. And another. And don't talk to me about sound proofing.. it's non-existing. What with no insulation in walls.)
When I lived in Japan it was in a relatively recent (last 10 years) but not brand new apartment block - Maybe if you are talking about a rural area or an old postwar Showa era house, sure. But either way the sound proofing is worlds better than any new construction in the US.
I'm in a 20 year old two-storey apartment right now (while we're building a new house), and the sound-proofing isn't non-existing but not as bad as some other apartments I'm aware of (where you can't make a sound without the neighbors start knocking on the walls/floors, and you're privy to thing you don't actually want to hear..) - but we can hear every footstep when the neighbors walk the stairs to their upper floor. The rooms which are more distant are fine, we don't actually hear them talking. Most of the time.
Yikes. I also just noticed that all the plugins (part of the pro feature set) rely on separate apk downloads from the Play Store, which all appear to be dead/delisted. This is really a shame, I too have thought of this as "the best" Android SSH client in the past.
Yes, it is enabled by default (in fact this caused problems earlier on). Licensed hams (in the US) can increase transmit power (and theoretically use additional spectrum outside of ISM) but even the default "public" channel was encrypted with a known, publicized key. There was some debate whether this ran afoul of amateur radio rules against encryption, even if the key is known, since it cannot be disabled. I believe there was some progress in fixing this and allowing truly unencrypted channels for licensed operators, but I haven't checked back recently.
We frequently get juniors or interns who are perfectly capable of pumping out many LoC with the use of AI in various forms - the issue is that they _don't_ actually ever learn how to think for themselves, and can't fix problems when something goes wrong or the LLM paints itself into a corner. I have found myself doing a lot more shepherding and pairing with juniors when they can't figure something out recently, because they just have not had the space to build their own skills.
A few years later but similarly - I am still running a machine built spur-of-the-moment in a single trip to Micro Center for about $500 in late 2019 (little did we know what was coming in a few months!). I made one small upgrade in probably ~2022 to a Ryzen 5800X w/ 64GB of RAM but otherwise untouched. It still flies through basically anything & does everything I need, but I'm dreading when any of the major parts go and I have to fork out double or triple the original cost for replacements...
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