France, Germany, Sweden, Estonia and India already have government id. However, this being hackernews there will never be a link to a well researched article on the pros and cons of introducing id cards (digital or otherwise), only conspiracy theories and confident declarations that id cards are a surefire symbol of authoritarian states. I don't know what I think, I lack sufficient knowledge to have an opinion. But I still know approximately 10,000x more about UK politics, economics and immigration than 99% of the people commenting here.
France Identité app is closed source, requires GMS and Play Integrity, and is only available on closed stores. It is not yet mandatory but who knows when it'll happen. No thanks.
The root of the issue is a mistrust of a Govt that has suddenly decided to rush through something, that was never discussed prior to the election, on the grounds that it will tackle illegal immigration, which it clearly will not.
The original author submitted it, then when it didn't get traction it looks like two fans of his blog both submitted it around 12 hours later. Whether for internet upvote points or because they personally thought the article particularly great, I don't know.
Personally I generally enjoy the blog and the writing, but not so much this post. It has a very clickbaity title for some results which aren't particularly impressive.
It's hardly original, but my take is that vibe coding works brilliantly for personal projects (or potentially for tiny startups that need to rapidly churn out CRUD boilerplate, API integrations, etc), but terribly for most large commercial systems.
I'm having fun with Claude Code and Vibe Kanban on personal projects, and before that I spent a lot of time with both the Windsurf and Cursor agents. It's making me literally 10x more productive on personal projects, maybe even 50x.
On personal projects:
- no-one but me needs to decide on requirements
- no-one but me needs to make decisions
- no-one but me needs to maintain the code going forward
- much of the time I'm intentionally using languages and frameworks that I am somewhat clueless about, and an LLM providing continuous ideas (even if sometimes entirely silly ones) stops me getting stuck
- I don't mind if there are large chunks of useless or half-working code
On commercial projects:
- every line of code is a massive liability. Every line needs to be reviewed by another engineer, and every developer who joins the project needs to be aware of it, take it into consideration when making changes elsewhere, and potentially debug it if something goes wrong
- senior engineers are almost always hired to work with languages and technologies they are already very familiar with, meaning for many tasks it's often quicker to write out the code by hand (or perhaps with Cursor's auto-complete) than guide an LLM to do it
- much of the time is spent in meetings trying to unearth the real product requirements or providing updates to stakeholders
- much of the time is spent reading old code and working out how to implement things in extremely large and complex systems in a minimally disruptive way
- a lot of time is spent reviewing other people's PRs, and getting infuriated when people (often either very junior or very senior) produce 1000 line PRs consisting of unnecessary changes, excessive boilerplate, half-finished experiments, and things that clearly haven't been tested properly. This was the case long before LLMs, AI just makes it ever more tempting for people to act this way.
- trying to avoid or gently negotiate political games over who is in control of the project, or who gets to makes technical decisions
if we have to put numbers on it, I'm attempting projects I wouldn't have, because the startup cost was too high, so does that make me infinity times more productive on that project because the denominator otherwise would have been zero?
Yup entirely this. The biggest sign of this is Tommy Robinson, who has blatantly committed outrageous cases of stalking, harassment, and contempt of court, for which he has been convicted. But because his schtick is complaining about Muslims he is then treated as a hero of the US right, gets invited on right-wing talk shows and gets bigged up by Elon Musk. I recently had a guy sit next to me on a plane bring him up as supposed proof of the UK being an authoritarian state.
I go absolutely out of my way to avoid politics nowadays, which makes it all the more frustrating when this nonsense is shoved in my face by idiots on HackerNews or dimwits sitting next to me on the plane.
Black Mirror is the new 1984. Right wing people think "this is a parable of what left-of-centre politics gets you, look how clever I am". Left-of-centre people know that the author of 1984 fought for the socialists in the Spanish Civil War and that the author of Black Mirror is a Guardian journalist.
I like the animations and general appearance, and how snappy it feels. Would prefer if mistakes required a backspace though, and also more than one word at a time. Also unclear if the timer starts when the word is shown or when you start typing.
The Scala community soap-opera was a total shit show. Both of the women involved later ended up in relationships with Travis Brown, another prominent and extremely controversial Scala figure. Travis then entered a long running war against John De Goes and a bunch of other people in the Scala community before rage-quitting.
I don't believe the women entirely made it up, or that Jon Pretty is entirely guilt-free. Likely he is a narcissist who took advantage of his status to pursue sexual relationships where there was a huge imbalance of power. Maybe this strayed into manipulative gaslighting, I don't know. But it also seems entirely plausible that the women in question desired a relationship with a powerful older man and that the relationships were essentially consensual. It's a mess of power, sex, alcohol, a lack of shared social norms, and overlapping social and professional relationships. Quite where the truth lies between "totally non-consensual gaslighting" and "consensual relationship with large imbalance of power" I don't claim to know.
