DrBazza

I didn't once mention ethics, and I wonder why you think I did. Perhaps my last comment? That simply states, and nothing more, that there is a small number of powerful (if not rich) people in control of what might now be the largest empire on Earth today if you measure it by economic output and control (sorry USA), which is what the article talks about: a small group of people, in the 1800s British Empire. History repeating itself, but differently. Power is always concentrated.

Also the article starts with an implicit assumption of survivorship/observational bias, the title being 'Why were Victorian elites so effective?' - the assumption that they really were 'effective' or was the rest of the world simply worse and they were simply the 'least worst'? That line of enquiry was not even discussed.

No mention of survivorship bias, or observational bias - framing it as the most 'effective' empire of the time, rather than it was simply 'less bad' than the others. I'd like to have read about maybe the Belgians or French in comparison, and what they did that was 'less effective'.

It ends with this American-centric paragraph:

> Would modern societies work better if their local and national government were conducted by a tight-knit community of extremely rich and successful people? Maybe not: the downsides are obvious. But the problems would be interestingly different from those that they have in reality. Imagine a San Francisco whose Board of Supervisors featured Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, each feeling this responsibility to be the greatest glory of his career, each hoping that he might one day attain the greater glory that is the House of Representatives. It might not be paradise. Maybe it would be a disaster. But it would certainly be interesting.

Well, the Chinese Politburo is 21 people that run a country of (maybe) 1bn people. The progress of China and the lifestyles of a billion people over 40 years is pretty remarkable.

There are signs that we are, and are not, in an AI bubble.

Compared to the dotcom boom, firms are well positioned in terms of capital - they have revenue and profits.

However, there's still the absurd speculative valuations, risk, and high expenditure (on said data centres). Also, Andrew Bailey from the Bank of England, personal opinion - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv8e30enrkxyo

Because recruiters have turned it into their platform and if your industry requires recruiters, they're all now on linkedin and that's where you have to go. You can try getting a job via other routes, but connecting to recruiters, it's the lowest effort/least friction.

In a different reality, the UK government didn't allow 90% of ARM to be sold to Japan/SoftBank, and ARM expanded into chip fabrication in Europe.

The road to gigatonnes of CO2 is paved with the good intentions of the Greens in every country.

FWIW, a very quick look at other comparable sites (what seems to be the main css files):

sourcehut's 128kb raw, and 28kb over the wire.

codeberg is 420kb raw, and 66kb over the wire.

> but there is a difference between deterministic compilation and non-deterministic LLM code

But not the point of my comment. Computer programming has been a progression of physically wiring up valves, to soldering transistors, to punched cards, assembly, then higher level languages. Now we have natural language models.

The analogy being each that most people don't care about the assembly generated as the code works and it's really performant/efficient. Humans can still optimise assembly, but there's vanishingly small marginal gains for all but the most intensive/low-level tasks.

If LLMs produce things that work, and are indistinguishable from a careful human programmer (i.e. with some level of acceptable performance), people will simply stop looking at the high level code as the end result works, in the same way most people stopped looking at generated assembly after 8 bit computers (for example, as most games were written in raw assembly for... perforamance), as it was good enough.

> If instead I use an LLM to rewrite a feature of a codebase I can't be sure that it still functions like the original one.

Right now, with existing static analysis tooling, you can ask it to write a full suite of unit tests capturing existing behaviour without modifying the existing code with 100% code coverage, and start there. Plus fuzz tests as well. I actually have marginally more confidence in that than a human being doing it.

Indeed, and that's not what I said or was implying. My comment was an analogy in response to:

> Until very recently, I pored over every single line of code Claude generated with razor sharp scrutiny.

As LLMs generate better code in a higher level language (where better equals fewer defects, and does what you want), scrutiny of that code by humans will naturally drop. Human scrutiny will likely be replaced by something that doesn't exist yet, perhaps some sort of higher-order 'LLM linter', or Lean-esque language or tooling that somehow proves the LLM did the correct thing.

It's entirely possible in 2026, to further manually optimise compiler generated assembly, but vanishingly few people do that.

The point of my comment is that 'good enough' is almost here as demonstrated by the parent's comment.

> A fully deterministc compiler

Well, there's the rub. Humans and LLMs that asked to solve a problem at a higher level will rarely write the same code twice. Write the simplest regex, and you won't come up with this https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/be...

The future is indeterminism.

Very few people scrutinise assembly in 2026 as compiler generated code is 'good enough'. LLMs are beginning to do the same with higher level languages.

Without bashing anyone in particular, a certain OS-vendor's desktop apps, have been 'good enough' to ship, but with p*ss-poor performance in many cases for the last decade or so. We crossed the 'good enough' Rubicon a few years back in terms of what end users receive as a finished app.

Hopefully LLMs will eventually bridge that last gap of efficiency when generating higher-level code that not only works, but is efficient. Maybe there's a future where they generate the final binary without even invoking a compiler.

My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.

Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?

Well, in the UK under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, with goods, you're entitled to refund, a repair, or a replacement. We're not good at class actions in the UK, so it's down to the individual, but if a one time payment for a game that was physical media, isn't a 'good', what is it?

I'll post the google/ai summary, but this mostly it:

Your Main Rights by Timeframe Within 30 Days: You have the right to reject the item and get a full refund.

After 30 Days and up to 6 Months: You must give the retailer one opportunity to repair or replace the item. If that repair or replacement fails, you are generally entitled to a full refund. The law assumes the fault was there when you bought it unless the retailer proves otherwise.

After 6 Months: You can still request a repair or replacement, but the burden is on you to prove the fault was present when you received the item. You have up to six years (five years in Scotland) to bring a claim for faulty goods in court.

I despise Sony and avoid them at all costs. They started with AACS and then finally lost me when they embedded Cinavia in the Playstation.

The definition of major is completely subjective. Adopting the Euro if the UK remained is major. What was a ‘major’ change when leaving? Everything has been mitigated by slow change. Euro migration was overnight in 1999 (I worked on it) that was major. And if that went to a referendum should be 60-40? What happens if it were 59.9-40.1 ?

That’s doesn’t make it better. You’re still rude and dismissive of part of an age group simply because their views and opinions differ to yours.

Well, after this week, it would actually be 'The America Telescope' wouldn't it?

I worked briefly in a satellite lab, and we did indeed have duplicate parts for most things.

Any space telescope with a mirror, is a different story, e.g.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/webbs-mirrors/

The RST has an 8ft mirror. The mirrors have to be ground and polished in a clean room to tolerances that are the highest in the world. I vaguely recall it's a square law or worse - for radius-to-time-to-polish. So you're paying for time, and you're paying for the expertise of one or two custom built places that can manufacture them.

Well if you're dismissive of an entire generation by calling them 'old farts', I'm not sure I can take you 'better informed 16 years old' argument seriously.

Well there is symmetry. Based on the original comment of wanting a clear majority to 'leave', knowing the result now and the polling at the time, that would have ensured the status quo would continue, and I'm guessing there, that the parent commenter voted remain.

A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain. If a majority vote isn't a majority vote, what's the point of calling yourself a 'democracy' and virtue signalling to the rest of the planet how great your governance is?

> a well defined outcome with known good and bad points

How so? What was the well-defined defined outcome of the UK joining the EEC in 1973? What's your time horizon? Was that outcome still true in 1980, 1999, 2026? How does being a member of the EU make you immune to probability and chance? Was a 'well defined outcome' in 1973 that, under the Blair government, we would allow East European nationals with freedom of movement to migrate en-masse to the UK, and that, ironically, is claimed to be one of the reasons for the leave vote.

It's actually quite sad to me that in 2026 the whole thing is still so tribal. Everything promised by either side largely never came to pass, and it's now a decade on. I just wish both sides would recognise that it's been over three decades of continuous poor Government that's the root of most of the UK's problems, and spend their energy fixing that instead.

You could flip that argument. The bar set to remain was too low.

As for 16 years old voting, I'd argue the age to vote should be raised to 21.

> Some particularly pernicious lies on the leave side too convincing

Both sides lied, both sides exaggerated.

The referendum to simply leave or remain would never have happened if UK Parliament went to the public more often with referendums about various treaties such as Maastricht, Amsterdam and Rome. Giving people the illusion of choice would have been enough.

The UK seems to be an outlier for an arrogant Parliament that thinks it knows best, in spite of public sentiment.

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

It's removing all the unnecessary words and fluff. FWIW I adhere to RFC-2119 when writing docs, and tell agents to do so as well.

I think there's a 'better' picture of Antares than there is Betelgeuse, but in the best traditions of yak-shaving, I discovered Betelgeuse has an imaged companion:

https://www.space.com/astronomy/stars/betelgeuse-betelgeuse-...

You're a little bit older than me - and I recall reading that 'our era' is actually pretty unusual for how quiet it has been in terms of natural disasters and their magnitudes.

Last major volcanic eruption around lots of humans: Krakatoa - 1883 Last major M9 earthquake before Sumatra: Chile - 1960

and so on. Things seem a bit more 'major' now because there's 7bn+ people.

People are good at reacting to a common danger. Look at the Boxing Day Tsunami - people standing and watching the sea as they just didn't know what it was as they had never seen it before.

This month a 'hunger stone' appeared in the Danube, indicating the levels for pre-20th century famine.

And various other markers in many countries for 'the water reached this level', ironically, on the side of existing buildings.

Yet we build closer and closer to rivers because (flash) flood events happen rarely, and typically not in our lifetime.

The Uk could have been in 100% in the 90s and saved us decades of copper theft.

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

It's just another tool. Programming is/can be fun. People still hand turn wood, and make their own furniture, even though Ikea exists.

Or maybe 'code' just gets pushed down a level like assembly did when C was invented, for example. As a percentage very few people look at assembly in comparison to the 1960s-80s.

So Anthropic goes on the shit list with Sony Blu-ray and its cinavia watermarking.

I did a lazy ask google, and it thinks less than 3% of crude oil is used for energy. The vast bulk of oil being used: 'transportation (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel), heavy machinery, and non-energy uses like asphalt and plastics rather than power plants'.

That is of course, one of the big problems of 'going green' - electricity production is low hanging fruit and understood by the general public.

When that's 'solved' (solar, wind, geo, nuclear), how do we solve the other 97%?

Oil really isn't going anywhere. It will be a slow tail, perhaps too slow to stop emissions.

https://www.iea.org/world/oil

Replace philosophers for mathematicians and Douglas Adams was spot on again.

Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures, they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do. I suppose there really are some mathematicians out there today, whose last few years of study, have just been up-ended by this.

--

"Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!"

"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.

"I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"

"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!"

"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"

> Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught.

Maybe? But more likely their 'surprise' will be that it's actually happened, because the people doing this kind of thing must surely know it's wrong and won't be telling their bosses, and/or their bosses definitely won't be passing that info up the chain. Just like movies, 'plausible deniability'.