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johnea commented on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work   simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw
JoeAltmaier · 8 hours ago
Retired
johnea · 4 hours ago
> Retired

You and me both, and for many of the same reasons.

I would point out that in your OPs comment, Luddites get the stereotypical dismissal as anti-tech, which is far far from the reality of demanding good conditions for workers.

For the modern s/w engineer, being granted the time and resources for adequate testing could be considered a "worker's rights" issue. In that context the Luddite allegation could be accurate.

My comment is largely along the same lines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313297#46319510

johnea commented on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work   simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw
johnea · 4 hours ago
I couldn't agree more with the sentiment.

If you, the development engineer, haven't demonstrated the product to work as expected, and preferably this testing is independently confirmed by a product test group, then you can't claim to be delivering a functional product.

I would add though, that management, specifically marketing management setting unreasonable demands and deadlines, are a bigger threat to testing than LLMs.

Of course the damage done by LLM generated code not being tested, is additive to the damage management is doing.

So this isn't any kind of apologism, the two sources are both making the problem worse.

johnea commented on Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch   theverge.com/news/845400/... · Posted by u/tortilla
m463 · 5 hours ago
I worry about the new cellular standards that support large scale iot.

Search for 5g miot or 5g massive iot or maybe even 5g redcap

johnea · 5 hours ago
This is exactly the situation we're in with new automobiles...
johnea commented on Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch   theverge.com/news/845400/... · Posted by u/tortilla
rootusrootus · 5 hours ago
Sadly, it seems like the contingent of people who have a problem with Smart TVs is small but noisy, and has no real market power. If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.

Sort of reminds me how we complain loudly about how shitty airline service is, and then when we buy tickets we reliably pick whichever one is a dollar cheaper.

johnea · 5 hours ago
Hope does spring eternal, doesn't it 8-/

If no one manufactures such a product, how does the "market" express this desire?

Buying one toaster, that would last your lifetime, is easily manufactured today, and yet no company makes such a thing. This is true across hundreds of products.

The fact is, manufacturing something that isn't shit, is less profitable, so what we're gonna get is shit. It doesn't really matter what people "want".

This is true for toasters and TVs...

johnea commented on Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years   japantimes.co.jp/news/202... · Posted by u/rgovostes
kazinator · 2 days ago
Hepburn is poorly supported in some input methods, like on Windows. If you want to type kōen or whatever, you really have to work for that ō. It's better now on mobile devices and MacOS (what I'm using now): I just long-pressed o and picked ō from a pop-up.
johnea · 2 days ago
Hepburn also allows the use of the double vowel, in this case: kooen
johnea commented on Umbrel – Personal Cloud   umbrel.com... · Posted by u/oldfuture
johnea · 3 days ago
SSH is my "personal cloud"...
johnea commented on Therapeutic use of cannabis and cannabinoids: A review   jamanetwork.com/journals/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
vorpalhex · 4 days ago
Denial
johnea · 4 days ago
Denial of confirmation bias
johnea commented on Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTO... · Posted by u/joelkesler
johnea · 5 days ago
A) I'm not going to watch the video because it's hosted by goggle, and I'm not interested in being goggled.

B) However, even without watching the video, it must be describing corporate product UI, because in the free software world, there is a huge variety of selections for desktop (and phone) UI choices.

C) The big question I continue to come back to in HN comments: why does any technically astute person continue to run these monopolistic, and therefore beige, boring, bland, corporate UIs?

You can have free software with free choice, or you can have whatever goggle tells you...

johnea commented on South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity   worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/barry-cotter
johnea · 7 days ago
Just in my lifetime, the world population, an simultaneously the US population, has tripled.

The world's economic output and productivity are at all time highs.

Natural resources are at tipping points of extreme exploitation, and toxic output is causing other massive tipping points of natural destruction.

And somehow, the population going down is a big problem?

To put it bluntly, this is total bullshit!

If you take the world's most hateful pricks out of the picture, there is no shortage of anything.

The problem is not an availability of resources, it in who gets to keep them.

The best thing that could happen to ease the impact of our human footprint, would be for the population to go down.

Then we wouldn't have to tolerate some of the stupidest ideas in the modern world, like flying people to mars!

Fix where the fucking money goes! Then we can accept the population reduction for what it is, the greatest trend to emerge in recent decades...

johnea commented on A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him for It   404media.co/a-developer-a... · Posted by u/markatlarge
lynndotpy · 7 days ago
Agreed entirely.

I want to add some technical details, since this is a peeve I've also had for many years now:

The standard for this is Microsoft's PhotoDNA, a paid and gatekept software-as-a-service which maintains a database of "perceptual hashes." (Unlike cryptographic hashes, these are robust against common modifications).

It'd be very simple for Microsoft to release a small library which just wraps (1) the perceptual hash algorithm and provides (2) a bloom filter (or newer, similar structures, like an XOR filter) to allow developers to check set membership against it.

There are some concerns that an individual perceptual hash can be reversed to a create legible image, so I wouldn't expect or want that hash database to be widely available. But you almost certainly can't do the same with something like a bloom filter.

If Microsoft wanted to keep both the hash algorithm and even an XOR filter of the hash database proprietary, that's understandable. But then that's ok too, because we also have mature implementations of zero-knowledge set membership proofs.

The only reason I could see is that security-by-obscurity might be a strategy that makes it infeasible for people to find adversarial ways to defeat the proprietary secret-sauce in their perceptual hash algorithm. But I that means giving up opportunities to improve the algorithm, while excluding so many ways it could be useful to combat CSAM.

johnea · 7 days ago
So, given your high technical acumen, why would expose yourself to goggle's previously demonstrated willingness to delete your career's and your life's archive of communications?

Stop using goggle!

It's as simple, and as necessary, as that.

No technically astute person should use ANY goggle services at this point...

u/johnea

KarmaCake day412September 17, 2019View Original