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Micropayments would be devastating for news because they'd reveal what people actually value at the margin. Subscriptions work precisely because they obscure this — you pay $15/mo and read 3 articles, and the newspaper pretends that's fine.

Per-article pricing would expose that 90% of online journalism is commodity rewrites of AP wire stories. The 10% that's genuinely original would thrive, and everything else would die overnight. Which is exactly why no major outlet will ever voluntarily adopt this.


- The 10% that's genuinely original would thrive, and everything else would die overnight.

And you are saying that's a bad thing?


Good point

> Per-article pricing would expose that 90% of online journalism is commodity rewrites of AP wire stories.

And recommendations for products they've never tried, with affiliate links.


The exoskeleton framing is comforting but it buries the real shift: taste scales now. Before AI, having great judgment about what to build didn't matter much if you couldn't also hire 10 people to build it. Now one person with strong opinions and good architecture instincts can ship what used to require a team.

That's not augmentation, that's a completely different game. The bottleneck moved from "can you write code" to "do you know what's worth building." A lot of senior engineers are going to find out their value was coordination, not insight.


Uh, that is the dictionary definition of augmentation.

One person with tools that greatly amplify what that person can accomplish.

Vs not having a person involved at all.


Did you purposely write this to sound like an LLM?

The benchmark jumps are impressive but the real question is whether Gemini can stop being so aggressively helpful. Every time I use it for coding it refactors stuff I didn't ask it to touch. Claude has the opposite problem where it sometimes does too little. Feels like nobody has nailed the "do exactly what I asked, nothing more" sweet spot yet.

The article nails it but misses the flip side. AI doesn't make you boring, it reveals who was already boring. The people shipping thoughtless Show HN projects with Claude are the same people who would have shipped thoughtless projects with Rails scaffolding ten years ago. The tool changed, the lack of depth didn't.

This is the right critique. The whole article is a fun thought experiment but it massively overestimates the problem by ignoring causality. In practice, UUID collisions only matter within systems that actually talk to each other, and those systems are bounded by light cones. 128 bits is already overkill for anything humans will build in the next thousand years. 256 bits is overkill for anything that could physically exist in this universe.

Performance wasn't really the issue here though. The issue was that Swift's C++ interop is still half-baked and kept breaking the build. You can write a perfectly fast browser in Swift for the non-hot-path stuff, which is most of a browser. They killed it because the tooling wasn't ready, not because the language is slow.

It wasn't the reason why it was removed, but, well we agree, it would have been a problem if used indiscriminately. I didn't do any additional research, but what I read in public was simply "Ladybird is going to use Swift".

This is the part nobody wants to say out loud: most writing was already bad before LLMs. AI didn't kill good writing, it just made bad writing free. The people who were reading AI-generated slop on Amazon are the same people who were reading ghostwritten garbage before. Good writers still have audiences, they're just not competing in the SEO content farm game anymore. And honestly they never should have been.

<< most writing was already bad before LLMs.

I am not sure this is the problem. The problem, as it were, is that writing muscles will atrophy and in a year or two we will be looking at those tiktok reels as long lost havens of enlightenment. Personally, if anything, I write a lot more now, but then I am fascinated by llms and how they work, so .. I test and that requires writing. I might be bad, but there is hope I won't need ugh to English llm translator.


If you're worried about a rug pull, you should be. Not because Tailscale is shady, but because that's just how VC-funded infrastructure works. The free tier exists to build lock-in, not out of generosity. Headscale exists but honestly it's a pain to run compared to just paying Tailscale $18/user. The real answer is: if it's critical infrastructure, you should be running Wireguard directly and owning the coordination layer yourself. Everything else is renting convenience.

It happened to others but there are also some very good examples like Veeam community edition which, IMO, is the best backup software. They had lots of discussions and even pressure from management to terminated, but the numbers made a lot of sense and they kept it. Tailscale is in disadvantage here because they are in a very crowded market and it will be very easy to slip into one corner and let way for others like netbird, netmaker, nebula(?), wireguard (like u said), etc.

Calling standard KYC paperwork for international wire transfers "dangerous and unethical" is a huge stretch. Every cross-border payment requires this stuff. The fund is literally trying to give away free money and the maintainer threw a fit because they had to fill out a tax form. I get being cautious about sharing personal info but framing compliance requirements as some kind of attack is drama for drama's sake.

Whoah, everyone here who has a bank account - which I assume is pretty much everyone -- has gone through "standard KYC paperwork", and I've never been asked to send personal financial documents to an email inbox.

I've opened several bank accounts online and do online banking as well as brokerage and other accounts. Financial documents like this should be uploaded via secure portals and directly stored in encrypted databases with controlled access and network segmentation from the rest of the IT infrastructure.

I am editing this comment to say that I don't think what was being requested is malicious or unethical, but I hope you can understand why people would not feel comfortable doing this, even if they are fine with KYC processes in general.


> I've never been asked to send personal financial documents to an email inbox.

Try going to a self-service short-term rental in the UK / EU. You'll find out 48 hours before the trip that you won't get the access code until you send a copy of your ID to weed+lower.6969@gmail.com, and there won't be time to argue.


Consumer banking: agree.

Corporate banking, I’ve seen exactly this. Asked to send PII docs via email to open accounts and do background checks.

Big 4 Australian bank.

Or I could go into a branch… but all they were going to do was email the copies to the same email address.


It'd be interesting to get a patio11 perspective on what is or is not "standard KYC paperwork" in a trans-national transaction.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/kyc-and-aml-beyond-th...


This is false. I just did an international wire transfer a few weeks ago with no KYC.

Right, so you think.

But: your bank knows who you are and the recipient's bank knows who they are. Your transfer may have been below the increased attention threshold ($10K to $50K depending on the jurisdictions of both recipients).

Both your accounts are most likely not recent and in good standing.

And so on. I routinely make international wiretransfers as well but I'm under no illusion whatsoever that if I tried to cross an anti-money-laundering or anti-terrorism-financing threshold somewhere that the transfer would be immediately stopped and an investigation would ensue.


Right but presumably the OP had an existing bank account. You can't wire money into thin air. Assuming OP is a regular person with a regular bank account, then further KYC isn't necessary. KYC for every international wire transfer is in fact not true at all, only for the edge case where a person wants to receive money and he has no existing account to transfer it in.

You can't just transfer money to a person that has no account. That's not an 'edge case' that just isn't how it works unless you want to use WU or something similar and even they have strict KYC requirements for larger sums.

If you want to move large amounts of money outside of the regular financial networks and oversight it is possible but (1) it will cost you (2) you will be breaking the law and (3) you may cause others to be breaking the law. Bitcoin would be one way to do it but even that is not nearly as anonymous as most of its users believe.

Banking is a regulated industry for a reason. There was a period (roughly until 2001, guess why) when banks were willing and able to bend the rules depending on who the customer was and how much money was involved. Those banks that continued to do this post 2001 have - if they're located in the West at least - had their ears bent in ways that they did not like one bit and even the Swiss now play ball.

Cash is becoming harder to use and harder to get. Money will most likely go digital in the West soon, the various governments don't like the unauditable and untaxable money streams that cash provides.


> You can't just transfer money to a person that has no account. That's not an 'edge case' that just isn't how it works unless you want to use WU or something similar

Preeetty sure this is something explicitly supported via standard SWIFT messaging.


That the protocol (which predates a lot of legislation) supports it does not mean that your bank supports it. Give it a try though, I'd love to hear about it.

Surely that just depends on how important of a customer you are.

I have no need for this, but have witnessed some pretty exotic swift messaging in my life and I wouldn’t be surprised if e.g. some banks in Africa have to regularly deal with this exact kind of situation.


I think that's enough goalpost moving for one discussion, we've gone from 'this is easy' to 'VIPs can have the rules bent, sometimes'. I've worked for a bank and I have seen some 'exotic Swift messaging' as well but I also know how rare it is. Joe average does not have access to this kind of feature through their telebanking interface, or any other means.

The War on Terror Financing(tm) made KYC-less transfers using formal banking systems well nigh impossible. Your transaction was covered by past KYC (by your financial institution).

That means either you did KYC paperwork in the past that is still covering new transactions, or that you haven't crossed the line that triggers KYC (in my experience, usually somewhere > $10-20k in cumulative transfers).

The horse already left the barn. Every major AI lab scraped the entire internet years ago. Asking archive sites to "take a harder stance" now is just performative. The training data is baked in. The only real question left is whether we want the knowledge accessible to individuals too, or only locked inside corporate models.

That is just not true. These AI scrapers are hammering all types of sites and causing their bills to explode.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/wikipedia-faces-flood-of-ai-bots-...

The nature of archives is that they are constantly updated.


That's a good point I suppose.

I guess I'm just kind of sad. LLMS appropriately sourcing material could have been such a boom for artists in a way. I guess I feel like it was a missed opportunity for some mutual benefit.

Would have been a really interesting at least.


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