When a government feels the need to implement technical control measures against ordinary citizens, the tight leash that the people had on their government's authority is broken.

Mass censorship, surviellence, and erosion of privacy are incompatible with human dignity. Purely utilitarian stances advocating online censorship "for the greater good", exploiting the causes of "terrorism" and "child safety" fail to consider anything more than the first order consequences.

Once a government taste the powerful liquor of censorship, there's no way that bottle's ever getting corked again. You bet your ass when anything happens that threatens those in power, that they'll be using that censorship on more than just the evil porn websites and terrorists.

I hope that this GFW leak helps researchers and hobbyists alike find more ways to fight against government erosion of personal dignity.

Either I am mistaken that Walmart was offering store associate type jobs or the author doesn't realize Walmart has software engineering teams. Quite a few non-tech companies have very hip, modern, and high-power tech teams behind them.

https://github.com/walmartlabs

Walmart has been doing this level of work since at least 2013/2014 to my knowledge so it's not something new.

Getting a job on the Walmart engineering team doesn't seem like such an awful thing. Other notable call-out: Domino's. A few years back (... like a decade ago ._.) I had done a re-write of a node.js wrapper for the Domino's API and the team seemed very supportive and proud of what people did with it. The REST API was actually quite good and didn't try to throw up roadblocks.

"secret society" -> "anonymous publishing group"

Fwiw I think the ratio of times I needed to go to google for a solution instead of an LLM is like 20:1 for me so your mileage may vary. Depends a lot on the specific niche you're working in.

Unrelated to software but recently I wanted to revive an old dumbphone I haven't used since 2014 and apparently I had it password protected and forgot the password and wanted to factory reset it. I found the exact model of the phone and google had only content farm articles that didn't help me at all but Gemini gave me the perfect solution first try. I went to google first because I had no faith in Gemini since to me it seemed like a pretty obscure question but guess I was wrong.

These metaphors all suck. Well, ok, yours is funny. But anyway, LLMs are just very different from any human.

They are extremely shallow, even compared to a junior developer. But extremely broad, even compared to the most experienced developer. They type real fuckin fast compared to anyone on earth, but they need to be told what to do much more carefully than anyone on earth.

"Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population."

This seems to weaken the entire paper. The only regions poised for continuing population growth into the second half of this century are in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Afghanistan [1].

Is the premise here that unlimited immigration into other regions from sub-Saharan Africa will sustain their economies (and other ways of life?) as the local populations decline? I'm extremely skeptical of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections

lol.. hampering the sales globally so that you can look good to the man-child emperor.

Remember future contenders... bribery is legal now.