Nextgrid

> Perhaps someone at their end screwed up a loop conditional, but you'd think some monitoring dashboard somewhere would have a warning pop up because of this.

If you've been in any big company you'll know things perpetually run in a degraded, somewhat broken mode. They've even made up the term "error budget" because they can't be bothered to fix the broken shit so now there's an acceptable level of brokenness.

> the maximum fine for this is 4% of last years total revenue or 20 mio €, whichever is the larger number.

The maximum fine wasn't even achieved by Facebook, after years and many blatant GDPR cases. Do you really think someone is getting a fine for not replying to a subject access request in due time? If so I have a very good bridge to sell you, and that bridge has more probability to exist than Amazon getting any kind of GDPR fine for not acknowledging a SAR.

The badge could (I don't know, haven't done it yet) help you differentiate yourself in a sea of monkeys slinging ChatGPT'd profiles from a third-world boiler room.

(whether it actually does or the monkeys now got a steady source of fake/stolen IDs is another matter)

EU GDPR has very little enforcement. So while the regulation in theory prevents that, in practice you can just ignore it. If you're lucky a token fine comes up years down the line.

Ending up on HaveIBeenPwned is only a problem if you reuse passwords.

My advice is that there's a big difference between "software engineering" as a career where you're employed by companies and "software engineering" where you're delivering solutions for yourself or clients.

The career track feels like it's being obsoleted by AI/LLMs, and that's because a lot of the work is either genuinely superfluous and not actually needed, or rote memorization (where LLMs indeed excel at), or are a sign of over-hiring during the pandemic and even earlier during the ZIRP era and AI/LLMs are merely a convenient excuse to lay them off. Technically-speaking the career track still exists but it's saturated, so let's assume it doesn't anymore.

The "problem solving" track is nowhere near obsoleted. LLMs can be used to automate away typing, but unless it's a specific task where you already expect to do a lot of typing, LLMs (from my experience) tend to produce worse results than just writing the code yourself directly. So software engineering expertise is still valuable.

The career track is threatened for several reasons:

* the hiring market is outright broken (I'm hiring and feeling it). Any job posting is going to be flooded with monkeys (or agents) slinging ChatGPT'd resumes left and right, which are indistinguishable from genuinely skilled candidates. There is no way to tell them apart short of interviewing them, which is difficult when a job posting is going to be DDoS'd with 1k applications a day. And even the interviews themselves are fraudulent - candidates using LLMs and screen-capture/speech recognition to answer the questions, or outright outsourcing the interview to a skilled person, but the actual candidate is a monkey that doesn't know how to print a hello world. This doesn't mean the demand is reduced, but the hiring is happening behind closed doors with people referring other people they already know and trust, so it's impossible to get into for a new entrant.

* A lot of "software engineering" jobs were genuinely just rote typing with little agency. The frontend sphere is especially affected - not surprising because a lot of "frontend" was just trying to reimplement native browser behaviors that were perfected 2 decades ago and could be invoked with just HTML if only the architects had the pragmatism of settling on a mixed "static HTML for the boring bits, and React/$JS_FRAMEWORK_OF_THE_DAY for the interactive stuff".

Now, what do you want to do?

* you want the career track? Well the issue is that a lot of the rote typing stuff (which nevertheless yielded many six-figure jobs just a few years prior and helped push software engineering from a nerd thing to a mainstream easy-money career) is going away, so it's probably not gonna happen. And the genuine roles are hard to get in because the hiring market is both broken and saturated from all the layoffs.

* you want to build products? That's still valid, but requires a different skillset (which includes marketing yourself). There's just as many clients who need pixels put on screen (if anything, there's even more now that LLMs allow any non-technical founder to prove product-market fit using a vibe-coded prototype before committing to an actual production-grade codebase), but the skills required are different.

On the second point, you need to have an end-to-end understanding of the stack to succeed. Not super specialized, but you need to be able to go from the pixels on the screen all the way to the server (databases and stuff), networking and all the way to interacting with any third-party APIs you might use (do you know about idempotence and the CAP theorem? Well if not an LLM can elaborate and make you learn it, but as you can see you still need an initial understanding to know the right questions to ask).

LLMs are actually a boon in this case - they're like your own personal tutor and senior colleague you can ask anytime anywhere. But you still need to put in effort to build and refine products and you'll learn over time.

My advice is that software engineering (and generally being good with tech/computers) is a superpower that can greatly help you in your existing business. As freelancing, it can work as long as you have enough skill (even if LLM-assisted) to deliver things someone will actually pay good money for. But purely as a career track (without a direct, profit-supported deliverable tied to it), it's dead, and LLMs aren't even to blame, they're just a convenient scapegoat to get rid of all the over-hired employees from the ZIRP era.

Good luck. Email in my profile if you want to chat further - just don't expect any miracles, I don't have any particular good news for a junior, and even for seniors it's really difficult right now.

Considering the age, HTTP is likely.

It's also a ton of security-sensitive code that parses untrusted data in a memory-unsafe language.

You need to bring something to the table that would make it worthwhile for an engineer to work for you instead of doing it themselves.

That something can be money, or connections, or prospective customers.

There's a difference between documentation and LLMs. An LLM can be your own personal tutor and answer questions related to your specific code in a way no documentation can. That is extremely helpful until you master the programming language enough.

True, but with every other article on HN being about AI nowadays I assumed there was something to it.

Note: the "agent" the title refers to has nothing to do with an AI/LLM agent. Originally I thought this had something to do with an AI agent, as if someone put an AI agent in charge of identifying dark web pictures for clues. It's a good story nevertheless and I'm glad the victim was rescued, but nothing to do with AI/LLMs.

I just made the observation that whoever was behind it, it ultimately benefited the author in reaching this outcome.

Some crypto bros wanted to squat on the various names of the project (Clawdbot, Moltbot, etc). The author repeatedly disavowed them and I fully believe them, but in retrospect I wonder if those scammers trying to pump their scam coins unwittingly helped the author by raising the hype around the original project.

There's been some crypto shenanigans as well that the author claimed not to be behind... looking back at it, even if the author indeed wasn't behind it, I think the crypto bros hyping up his project ended up helping him out with this outcome in the end.

Manual of the calibration tool: https://pro.sony/s3/cms-static-content/operation-manual/3864...

They make it mandatory to accept tracking for targeted advertising (or pay, which itself requires providing personal information). This is not compliant with the GDPR.

Fines so massive every company out there (including the linked website) takes the (rational) decision to not comply with it.

This is highly region-dependent.

In the US the door close button is required to work in "fire service" mode, so that's why the button is always there.

Outside of fire service the button most likely will work, just that it can't override the minimum open door delay mandated by the ADA, so it feels like it doesn't work. You may be able to trick the logic into disregarding the timer by pressing door open and door close immediately.

In Europe, there is no "fire service" mode that I know of, so the button isn't always there. But if it is, it basically always works and doesn't have a minimum delay.

It's purely there to provide a signal to the oxygen waster product manager who is pushing the obnoxious "feature" in the first place. Their KPIs are not only "positive" engagement with the feature but also lack of "negative" engagement such as clicking the "show fewer" button. It otherwise has zero user-facing impact.

Fair, but in this case you'd still expect LLMs to be a massive boon to startups wanting to compete with the established players?

I'm not seeing any of that happening either, which I'd expect if the AI productivity claims were true and anyone could just vibe-code an entire sustainable business.

To a non-technical individual IBM is still seen as a reputable brand (their consulting business would've been bankrupt long ago otherwise) and they will absolutely pay attention.

Why is that bad? You write better code when you actually understand the business domain and the requirement. It's much easier to understand it when you get it direct from the source than filtered down through dozens of product managers and JIRA tickets.

Bold move.

Not because it's wrong, but because it risks initiating the collapse of the AI bubble and the whole "AI is gonna replace all skilled work, any day now, just give us another billion".

Seems like IBM can no longer wait for that day.

> Is the whole thing going to be open sourced?

It seems to be a one-of-a-kind simulation product that could be used as part of actual financial/trading training. There's insane value here, giving the source code away for free is absolutely not a good strategy.

> Uber drivers are over the minimum wage a lot of the time

Does this still hold once you account for fuel, insurance, and vehicle maintenance?

Meh, personally I clicked for the feline buzzword. Couldn't care less about the AI one.

As long as there's at least one gullible in the pack, all the other ones will behave the same because they now know there's one idiot that will happily hold the bag when it comes crashing down. They're all banking on passing the bag onto someone else before the crash.

A Ponzi can be a good investment too (for a certain definition of "good") as long as you get out before it collapses. The whole tech market right now is a big Ponzi with everyone hoping to get out before it crashes. Worse, dissent risks crashing it early so no talks of AI limitations or the lack of actual, sustainable productivity improvements are allowed, even if those concerns do absolutely happen behind closed doors.

There's no definitive way to tell if some code is written by AI or not; thus their statement doesn't have to be true. Usage of AI itself is nebulous, it could mean anything from OpenClaw-style automated agents to someone prompting an LLM via chat to an engineer manually writing code after wasting hours trying to get an agent to do it (that still counts as "usage", even if not ultimately productive).

The market currently rewards claims of usage of AI, so everyone is claiming to be using AI. There is no way to prove one way or another, and the narrative will be changed down the line once the market swings.

When it comes to productivity claims, I have yet to see it. If AI is truly providing significant, sustained productivity improvements across the software development lifecycle I'd expect products to be better, cheaper, or get developed faster (all of which happened with other industrial breakthroughs). I do not see that in software at large and especially not in Spotify's case.

Edited. I'm not strictly saying this was caused by AI, but more of a general point that AI is really good at producing crap work which would make the generator spin faster.