Aozora7

>Any if you are lying about the process - well If Google doesn't like your App or anything about you in the future, they can just delete whatever your App is citing false claims on your side.

They could do that for any reason or no reason at all anyway even without the testing requirement.

>Then why have it in the first place?

The inconvenience/effort is probably the point, likely to discourage people who aren't willing to put at least that much effort.

>and hope I don't get banned for using unauthentic testers.

I doubt Google cares about this, since they let apps for these testing groups into play store. Those apps organize people into groups, provide play store links, and buttons to open other people's apps, so all you do is just open and close each app once a day.

Since this takes like 30 minutes total over 14 days, I'd rather do that than pay $100 forever since I'm not made of money and it's less time than it would take me to earn $100 at my job even once.

It sucks, but it's more of a time gate and an inconvenience than an actual barrier. There are communities/apps where people do this for each other in an organized way, so you're pretty much guaranteed to pass after 14 days.

I published my first app a few months ago, and I hated 14 days part more than 12 people part.

Google take $25 once, Apple takes $100 every year. For hobby projects, the former is reasonable, and the latter is a dealbreaker.

I'm surprised Apple doesn't make you scan your ID since there are laws that force both Apple and Google to publish real names of developers on app store pages. And address too, if you charge money.

Russia isn't slow because it's methodical, it's just throwing all of the bodies it can buy at the problem, and the small advancements they get is what they buy with tens of thousands casualties per month. This is doing significant macroeconomic damage to Russia.

Years to capture Donbass is an absolutely pathetic rate of advance for an army that was supposed to be second in the world, fighting a war on its border.

Ukraine is large and conquering all of it would be a massive challenge for any army, but relative to resources Russia has available to it, its performance is awful.

Russia is on equal footing with a country third of its size that is supported by a small fraction of NATO's GDP. You can barely tell the difference between a territorial control map from 2023 and 2026. Neither side is capable of achieving its goals through military action.

Ukraine us unlikely to get back most of the territory it lost in 2022, but Russia is also unlikely to even finish capturing the remaining parts of the Donetsk oblast, let alone the rest of Ukraine. It's taking Russia months/years to capture settlements with just thousands of prewar population. Donetsk oblast still has a heavily fortified urban area with a prewar population of 500k under Ukrainian control.

The way it looks to me, the set of people who know what dots/muse actually do and why the are useful, and the set of people who don't use computers, don't overlap much.

I don't think you'll be able to make most non-tech savvy general population understand what those services do that a regular chat window does not.

I considered getting a Snapdragon X2E laptop, but the prices were so unattractive for otherwise similar specs that I went with X86.

Firefox reading mode works without issues for me on that page. But can confirm I see the same thing in Chrome.

We'll probably get there, once frontier labs RL the fuck out of AI agents sitting in meetings and interpreting incoherent ramblings of business majors into actionable requirements. That's the biggest value human devs currently provide.

Yes, AI for now has significant code quality issues, but that's mostly because it lacks agency to take care of code quality unless you explicitly tell it to. It is good at refactoring its own messes when you even vaguely ask for it. So while something like Astra still needs supervision to produce decent code, I expect that in a year or two it will be unnecessary.

I have seen a decent amount of clearly AI generated software that's useful, would likely not have been made without AI, and is better for for being AI generated. With AI, people make improvements that they would have never have bothered spending time to do manually. If anything, having uncharacteristically good "production value" in a clearly hobby project is how I typically spot AI use in projects that aren't obvious vibe coded slop.

The code itself may or may not be spaghetti. Not that I care as a user. User experience and code quality had never a particularly strong correlation even before AI.

No. Before AI, I have never wrote any code outside of work because nothing I could do in a reasonable time would be worth the effort.

With AI, if there's software I wish existed, I can make it happen without making it an unpaid second job.

Isn't the main issue that the audio you're compressing over bluetooth, like spotify streams, is already compressed? As far as I know, compressing already compressed audio compounds artifacts in the same way re-saving a JPEG does.

I switched to Firefox when chrome announced manifest v3, and I'm still happy with it. Not only I get a browser with a real adblock, now that I got used to multi-account containers, I can't go back to chrome since it has no good equivalent. And I'm also using it on mobile since it's one of the few mobile browsers with extensions too.

Noise reduction benefit is marginal. Most of the noise comes from tires rather than the engine. At 30 km/h tires are louder than the engine, so an EV driving at 50 km/h, which is the typical city speed limit, isn't any quieter than an ICE car.

In this particular case, it would be harder to produce a fake signature from a non-existent person if the signatures in questions were digital and backed by a national identity number. The kind of that I'm submitting when signing documents at work.

I'll have you know I started picking salads instead of fries in combo meals the moment they became available.

Not that I'm a frequent customer, either before or after.

When you renew your passport, the new one will have a new serial. Not matching a passport serial doesn't mean anything. Not matching a national identity number does.

Very few countries require you to carry an ID. Many countries require you to own one and keep it up to date, but don't care whether you carry it outside.

Also, I find the point kind of moot for the US where a driving license is essentially an ID card, you have to carry it to drive, and you have to drive to go anywhere in most places.

A government won't give up on malicious acts just because it lacks accurate census. The United States does a lot more surveillance and oppression than EU countries that have national ID and mandatory ID documents.

The lack of a comprehensive population database only seems to hinder the actual useful civilian bureaucracy, not law enforcement, intelligence services, or ICE. The latter just grab anyone who looks brown enough.

Identity numbers being abused is a consequence of them being misused. And as far as I can tell, this happens more often with american SSNs than anywhere with actual national identity numbers.

All that these numbers do is uniquely identify people. They aren't private. To actually prove your identity, you present your ID, passport, or a digital signature tied to that identity number.

This is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.

Harnesses exist to give models tools to do work beyond generating text. People install Claude Code and Codex to have models work inside their repositories and run the code or tests themselves instead of the user having to copypaste code between their IDE and a chat interface. The fact that there's some security built into the harnesses is just a practical consideration, not its primary function.

Consider what someone who doesn't use AI would take away reading that quote from the article, and what harnesses were actually made for.

I personally find that I hate any activity in a context where I'm paid for it.

I used GLM 5.0/5.1/5.2 for some projects, and for me, the area in which they lag behind frontier models the most are user interfaces. They get really close to Opus when it comes to pure algorithms, but when I need something like web application or a mobile app that looks and works well, they are very noticeably worse than even Sonnet.

There is, for example, OpenCode Go subscription, which for $10 a month gives you a decently generous quota of GLM-5.2, among other models.

And z.ai themselves also have subscriptions.

Author is from Latvia (and so am I). You do actually get carded for energy drinks if you look under 30.

However, more relevant to the post, is that when you're ordering groceries online, you need to verify your age at checkout if you're buying stuff like alcohol (or energy drinks). It's trivial, and for a lot of people it uses the same authentication service that they already use to access their bank.

With the release of GLM-5, I would say that they are pretty much almost as good. Basically 90% as good as Opus 4.6 on most tasks for 20% of inference cost, and open weights.

There already are LLMs with open weights that are better at code than state of the art closed source models from a year ago. For now, you most people may have to rent the hardware to run those models, since it's too expensive for most people to own something that can run inference on one trillion parameters, but I wouldn't consider LLMs to be controlled by "evil software corporations" at this point.