Readit News logoReadit News
__jochen__ commented on How Markdown took over the world   anildash.com/2026/01/09/h... · Posted by u/zdw
__jochen__ · a month ago
Sorry, I'm going to be a downer. I've been around for a long time too, saw many formats come and go (even contributed to some myself). I think Markdown is super neat and handy, but this statement "The trillion-dollar AI industry's system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format... Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours." ..is way off. NN math & engineering has been refined for ~50 years (give or take) and scaled to mindboggling levels. For better or worse, it is in the process of transforming how society functions (just like the internet and mobile phones did). Building modern advanced NN/AI requires extremely sophisticated and advanced science, hardware & algorithms; the format of the prompts conventionally used by some are a handy but fairly trivial part of the endeavor.
__jochen__ commented on Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban   krebsonsecurity.com/2025/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
heavyset_go · 3 months ago
You aren't thinking low enough for firmware.

All modern WiFi APs require closed firmware blobs that run below or parallel to OpenWRT.

You replacing the router OS with OpenWRT does nothing when the radio has full DMA access and runs its own OS on its own processor. The OpenWRT layer will have no idea what it's running/infiltrating/exfiltrating.

I say this as someone who has been running and building OpenWRT forever. It's great but it isn't a panacea.

__jochen__ · 3 months ago
Do you trust the seller on AliExpress selling the OpenWRT One router? OpenWRT links directly to it (from https://openwrt.org/start): https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007795779282.html
__jochen__ commented on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption   reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
giantg2 · 6 months ago
Stealing them is a possibility too. I think the point is still valid.
__jochen__ · 6 months ago
From a technical perspective there is so much you can do to secure things, including against theft. While it's hard to lock things down past 99.9% usage, it is not too hard to make token issuance secure enough for practical, wide-spread use (there are a plethora of crypto protocols out there to prove the point).

There's no guarantee that the government will pick the best standard, but one can hold out hope (e.g. when the US govt adopted Rijndael as the AES encryption standard).

__jochen__ commented on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption   reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
ryandrake · 6 months ago
> The real kicker to me is that the government has passed a law restricting access yet they haven't determined how they're going to enforce an age check. It's wild that they passed a law without consideration to its mechanics or feasibility.

I predict it won't even matter. This law is unenforceable in practice. There is nothing that a bored and highly-motivated teenager who has hours after school to fuck around, won't be able to circumvent. I think back to my teenage years: None of the half-assed attempts made to keep teenagers away from booze, cigarettes, drugs, or porn even remotely worked. These things were readily available to anyone who wanted them. If there is an "I am an adult" digital token, teenagers will easily figure out how to mint them. If the restrictions can be bypassed with VPNs, that's what they will do.

__jochen__ · 6 months ago
Amazing! Do you have some spare time? Can you quickly mint me a BTC token please. kthxbai ;)
__jochen__ commented on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption   reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
Aurornis · 6 months ago
> so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number

The trivial workaround is for people to create ad supported websites to hand out those tokens.

If there’s no logging then they can’t determine who’s abusing it or if they’ve even generated a different token recently, so people can generate and hand out all the tokens they want.

So then the goalposts move again, and now there’s some logging in this hypothetical solution to prevent abuse, but of course this means we’ve arrived at the situation where accessing any website first requires everyone to do a nice little logged handshake with the government to determine if they have permission. What could go wrong?

The real workaround is for people (including kids) to buy themselves a VPN subscription for a couple bucks per month and leave all of this behind while the old people are letting jumping through hoops.

__jochen__ · 6 months ago
The proposal is for SIGNED tokens i.e. only the govt can issue them, and you need a govt issued ID to generate them. The latter mechanism allows rate limiting. This fixes the problem you outline.
__jochen__ commented on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption   reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
_carbyau_ · 6 months ago
There needs to be some terms clarified. mygov vs mygovid vs myid.

Agreed, "myid" used to be called "mygovid".

But myid/mygovid is NOT mygov. I'm guessing the rename is likely because of that confusion.

mygov usage is high, 26 million accounts, according to [1] 2023 report.

Myid usage seems middling. 13 million according to [2] 2024 article.

Which platform to use for what and how I leave to you.

I don't want this. I don't want the government's aim for auditable provability of every item watched/interacted with in the name of "won't somebody think of the children!!!" level of authoritarianism.

There are plenty of households without kids. Why are they having to pay a privacy price?

[0] https://my.gov.au/en/about/help/digital-id

[1] https://my.gov.au/content/dam/mygov/documents/audit/response...

[2] https://www.ato.gov.au/media-centre/mygovid-being-renamed-my...

__jochen__ · 6 months ago
I agree the naming is a mess. There is the Australian Digital ID system (https://www.digitalidsystem.gov.au/how-the-system-works) which allows third party providers.

Whatever the capabilities of the Australian government ID services, there is a way to issue privacy-preserving tokens that could do all the things you'd need without being trackable the system was properly designed. (I have not studied the protocols of the Digital ID spec to say whether that's the case).

__jochen__ commented on Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age   manuel.kiessling.net/2025... · Posted by u/lamp_book
ramesh31 · 10 months ago
This maps pretty well to my experience.

Other devs will say things like "AI is just a stupid glorified autocomplete, it will never be able to handle my Very Special Unique Codebase. I even spent 20 minutes one time trying out Cursor, and it just failed"

Nope, you're just not that good obviously. I am literally 10x more productive at this point. Sprint goals have become single afternoons. If you are not tuned in to what's going on here and embracing it, you are going to be completely obsolete in the next 6 months unless you are some extremely niche high level expert. It wont be a dramatic moment where anyone gets "fired for AI". Orgs will just simply not replace people through attrition when they see productivity staying the same (or even increasing) as headcount goes down.

__jochen__ · 10 months ago
That's the problem. The new norm will be 10x of pre-AI productivity, nobody will be able justify hand-writing code. And until the quality bar of LLM's/their successors get much better (see e.g. comments above looking at the details in the examples given), you'll get accumulation of errors that are higher than what decent programmers get. With higher LOC and more uninspected complexity, you'll get significantly lower quality overall. The coming wave of AI-coded bugs will be fun for all. GOTO FAIL;
__jochen__ commented on AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please   sergey.fyi/articles/relia... · Posted by u/serjester
SkyPuncher · 10 months ago
Sure, but you're a professional software engineer, who I assume gets feedback and performance reviews based on the quality of your code.

There's always been a group of beginners that throws stuff together without fully understanding what it does. In the past, this would be copy n' paste from Stackoverflow. Now, that process is simply more automated.

__jochen__ · 10 months ago
There is also likely to be increased pressure in a SE job to produce more code. You'll find that if others use AI, it'll be hard to be a hold-out and hit fewer delivery milestones, and quality is hard to measure. People are rewarded for shipping, primarily (unless you're explicitly working on high reliability/assurance products).

Deleted Comment

Deleted Comment

u/__jochen__

KarmaCake day8February 21, 2012View Original