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Aw, another AI thing. I was hoping this was their email service.

that is in beta

Down again, now complaining about rate limit exceeded.

Considering how FB was ruined by enshittification and Twitter was ruined by its new owner, I'm worried about how BSky has no apparent plan for money, and hitting a rate limit is not a great sign.


Oh I do believe they have a plan. Something something AI.

This feels like a workaround for git's contradictory ergonomics.

My compromise pitch, since the "You need ID from your users" ship has sailed:

Companies are not liable if they have proper ID of the person who submitted the content and can provide that to a plaintiff. If they have not made a good-faith effort to know who submitted this info (like taking ID, not just an email address) then they're taking responsibility for the submitted content.

Which means sites that have responsible moderation can still allow anonymous contributions.

The real problem is the inherent asymmetry of legal battles, where the wealthiest can fight forever with endless motions and have near-total impunity while a legal action would basically nuke a normal person's life. Not to mention the fact that an international border can often make this whole conversation moot.


> Which means sites that have responsible moderation can still allow anonymous contributions.

Anonymous contributions, up to the point of somebody compromising the service? With the quantity of password hash thefts, I suspect we'll see even more ID thefts this way.

I can't imagine using any service that asks for ID, except perhaps from the well-established giants, so an exception for identifiability would effectively be a gigantic moat granted to the largest internet companies to keep out competition. Anything like that would need to be paired with massive anti-trust changes, as well as perhaps government take-over of the giants as utilities, none of which sounds very appealing...

That said, don't take any of my rambling as discouragement, your type of thinking is exactly what we need, we need massive amounts of policy discussion and your suggestion is very innovative.


That's basically how things used to work in Germany. It used to be that if someone torrented movies on your internet connection, you were fined. No ifs, no buts, they monitored 100% of the public torrents and courts agreed with 100% of the fines. And they didn't care who did it - if they didn't know (which is almost always true) they fined the owner of the internet connection. It was a really really bad law. For 10-15 years after every other country had public wifi hotspots, Germany didn't because the owner would get fined for every torrent. After a very long time, they eventually passed a law saying public wifi operators didn't have to pay.

I like this compromise.

One of my issues is the lack of liability in practice. The poster is technically liable but they're anon, behind proxies, foreign, etc. and unaccountable. It results in people being harmed online without recourse.

These companies should have a duty to know who their users are.


Azure PowerCopilot Live .NET

... 360 (+5)

Except they named their local hosted version of TFS/VSTS Azure DevOps Server (where the cloud version is Azure DevOps Services).

They just like branding their dev tools for whatever they're pushing at the time. In 2002 they named Visual Studio "Visual Studio .NET".


That's because TFS/VSTS followed the same naming convention where the "S" stood for either Server or Services. Once they rebranded the Azure-backed hosted version Azure DevOps Services, then it no longer really made sense to do anything but rename the self hosted version in the same fashion.

It would have been more confusing to have Visual Studio Team Server and Azure DevOps Services being the same product but hosted differently.


Not just developer tools, reusing trademarks in general.

At one point the next version of Windows Server 2003 was going to be Windows .NET Server.

Also Windows CE, Outlook Express, Xbox App, Xbox Game Pass for PC, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word, etc.


There is no perfect pasta sauce.

Only perfect pasta sauces.

Howard R. Moskowitz is an American market researcher and psychophysicist. He is known for the detailed study he made of the types of spaghetti sauce and horizontal segmentation. By providing a large number of options for consumers, Moskowitz pioneered the idea of intermarket variability as applied to the food industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Moskowitz


They broke laws that programmers care about.

Like, it's a company that sells AI-slop powered regulatory compliance. How many laws do you think the "fake it ill you make it and you'll never make it" AI will break? But "regulatory compliance" is laws that startups hate, so breaking them is good.

Copyright and the copyleft licenses built upon it are the laws that support the software industry instead of just making sure innocent people aren't hurt by all this innovating and disrupting.


As developers we have a unique advantage over everybody else dealing with the way AIgen is revolutionizing careers:

Everybody else is dealing with AIgen is suffering the AI spitting out the end product. Like if we asked AI to generate the compiled binary instead of the source.

Artists can't get AIgen to make human-reviewed changes to a .psd file or an .svg, it poops out a fully formed .png. It usurps the entire process instead of collaborating with the artist. Same for musicians.

But since our work is done in text and there's a massive publicly accessible corpus of that text, it can collaborate with us on the design in a way that others don't get.

In software the "power of plain text" has given us a unique advantage over kinds of creative work. Which is good, because AIgen tends to be clumsy and needs guidance. Why give up that advantage?


> the code should explain itself.

This is a good goal. You should strive to make the code explain itself. To write code that does not need comments.

You will fail to reach that goal most of the time.

And when you fail to reach that goal, write the dang comments explaining why the code is the way that it is.


But you will also fail to keep the comments and code synchronized, and the comment will at some point no longer describe why the code is doing whatever it does


Which is why you're reviewing changes. I haven't memorized what every line of code does, if it was worth commenting then it was confusing-enough that it needed the comment and so I'll read the comment to make sense of the code being changed. If I don't read the comment that means the comment was too far from the confusing code.

Alternately, you can say the same about informative variable names or informative function names. "If I change the function then the name is no longer accurate". You don't say that because function names and variable names are short and clear and are close to the problem at hand. Do the same with comments.

Which is why the copilot hyper-verbosity is harmful. Comments need to be terse so your eyes don't filter them out as noise.


Yeah, my point has basically nothing to do with AI and is the argument against comment blocks in general. It's bad to store information in two places.


But copilot code review agent is pretty good at catching when code and comments diverge (even in unrelated documentation files).


Honestly the aggressive verbosity of github copilot is half the reason don't use its suggested comments. AI generated code comments follow an inverted-wadsworth-constant: Only the first 30% is useful.


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