dgroshev

Fragile boilerplate.

I love "Zero to Production in Rust", but that's a pretty long book that recreates a fraction of what comes out of the box with Django. Also, when things come with Django, there's no need to maintain or worry about subtle yet crucial bugs.

Being as charitable as possible: there is a lot of difference between

- swear words

- slurs

- speech enabling political organising

…which is not a matter of "upset".

Parliament is not in control of its own timetable, for one. Bit of a restriction on exercising its sovereignty, innit. And yes democracies can be chaotic.

It's entirely mad to me that I can make a list of easily verifiable, massively important examples of democratic processes in this country in the last few years and someone would just come up with a hypothetical like "but what if King kills someone" like it's somehow not just equal but has more weight than the list. Mad

Parliament does have constitutional limits on it (for example, see timetabling powers or Erskine May), even if it can't pass acts that will bind future Parliaments. The constitution being (largely) unwritten and changeable doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The result is substantially more democratic, as per the list above.

> almost all western governments are increasingly unaccountable to their voters

In this country, the government with a vast majority couldn't even withdraw a small cash payment from better off pensioners without a rebellion from their own MPs.

Those generalising takes are entirely disconnected from the political reality of the UK outside of twitter.

Funny thing is, your desired system is a constitutional change and it's entirely feasible in the UK if there's enough support for it. Which is exactly my point.

We have a representative democracy, not a direct one.

I invite you to consider the rest of the points, too.

A representative democracy is still a democracy.

The ruling party has changed just two years ago. Hardly China, is it

As you're well aware, we have a first-past-the-post system and what matters in this system is the number of MPs.

What is the actual purpose of freedom of expression in a democracy? Is it being able to call people N-word online with no repercussions, or is it being able to organise, form political parties, and change the country?

If it's the former, then indeed the US has more of it.

If it's the latter, the UK has three new major parties with very different policies that openly and vocally oppose Labour, Conservatives, and Libdems. Mainstream media regularly broadcasts their views. I might strongly disagree with those views, but these parties are clearly freely operating political organisations. How is the US doing with viable non-Dem and non-Republican parties?

I won't comment on your Crown conspiracy theories.

Calling big changes in power, substantive shifts in policy, and constitutional changes "government theatre" to then link to "Flying_Rodent" on twitter as "reality" is just comically unselfaware.

To be entirely fair, that was a combination of many things (Pincher, wallpaper, partygate, covid deaths, covid deals, brexit, etc). The ministers are also MPs, and they want to be reelected. By that point it was clear that the partygate is not going away, so they needed a scapegoat.

The point still stands though. A populist PM who did a tiny bit of mismanagement and corruption (relative to his current peer in the US) was forced to resign. Trump isn't.

To add to this, she only served 40% of her sentence before being released.

UK is substantially more democratic than the US.

- We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.

- Parliament routinely rebels against the government, and backbenchers have a lot of say about the business of government.

- We have a number of upstart parties; they might be populist, but at least it's not a two-party-forever system.

- We had a coalition government just a few years ago.

- We changed our constitution a few months ago (abolishing hereditary peers) and it was just another news among many.

- We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown, with a massive scandal before that when the PM accepted a gift of some wallpaper.

Compare and contrast to the ossified and corrupt American system, where the president is openly enriching himself and his family and friends, and there's nothing threatening the presidency. The last amendment was passed half a century ago, and there's zero hope for reform.

Democracy is a living, breathing system of government, not a number of checkboxes like "can I shoot a gun for fun" or "can I call someone N-word online". It's important to see the forest for the trees.

Good points, but then even this little snippet is internally inconsistent. If I'm a lay-person, why should I care that "a comment would help"?

Claude is just comically bad nowadays.

No, it's just poor writing. Actionable points are buried inside the paragraphs and over-hedged, and one point is completely made up. Compare to a five second rewrite:

* Consider leaving a comment about the hard-coded Vercel target. It's not clear where does it come from.

* [This is just a bullshit point, because the domain is not "added to" Vercel, it's provided by Vercel]

* Are you sure that [CENSORED] is prod-only? The name suggests otherwise. [also, what "if you're reviewing this rather than just reading it" even means?]

I don't think it's substantially different. I just pasted a random chunk of code and asked Opus 5.5 to comment on it:

> The Vercel target is hard-coded. That's common and not wrong, but it's opaque; nobody reading this later will know which Vercel project it belongs to, and if the project is recreated the target changes silently. A comment or a named variable would help.

> Pointing a DNS name at Vercel is only half the job. The domain also has to be added to the project in Vercel's dashboard, otherwise requests will arrive and Vercel will reject them. That step lives outside this code, so it's easy to forget.

> Finally, [CENSORED] existing only in production is slightly odd on the face of it. It may be perfectly deliberate (perhaps a single shared testing tool that only needs one public address), but if you're reviewing this rather than just reading it, that's worth confirming.

It has the same annoying cadence and writing style with slightly less prominent claudisms.

I suspect a substantial part of this is an avalanche of useless testing.

If you even review PRs still: when was the last time you didn't just skip over tests? And if you ever looked at tests in an LLM-heavy PR, how many of those tests tested something useful, and not just built-ins and trivial behaviours?

There's at least some awareness in the industry of how LLMs generate a lot of boilerplate in business logic. It feels like we're much less aware of how much of it is in tests.

That's true, although inconvenient for production code that needs to be delivered yesterday.

Sadly, agents don't mind generating gigatons of code instead of refactoring the abstractions.

To add to this, I find that the delta between the amount of code and pain you get with good and bad abstractions is substantially higher in rust than other languages. It's alright to muddle through in Python or TS, but with Rust bad abstractions are punishing.

LLMs are pretty bad at picking abstractions.

Ukraine is retaking some of the territory right now. https://euobserver.com/236059/ukrainians-again-liberate-terr...

More likely than not a full endorsement, given DHH's multiple references to notoriously and openly racist "The Camp of the Saints", or this quote:

> standing idly by while your livestock is devoured by predators or your neighborhood is taken over by migrants

I don't think "growing polarisation" is the right framing here. It gives way too much weight and legitimacy to views that have to be subjected to cordon sanitaire [1].

It's not acceptable to associate race with national identity (DHH's London post). It's not acceptable to call for ethnic cleansing (his post on Travellers). It's not "just another view, couldn't we all get along"; we can respectfully disagree on small state vs large state, on low taxes vs high welfare, on isolationism vs interventionism even, but DHH's views have to be unacceptable.

What is happening is a number of very rich, powerful, well-connected men (and sometimes women, see AfD) are trying to normalise those views and demolish the cordon sanitaire. "It's just another view" and framing this view as legitimate, just polarised, is one of their tactics. It's a moral duty of anyone remotely believing in the OG liberalism (you know, that people are equal regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity) to not let them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(politics)

You're talking to the CEO of the want-to-be-SEO company [1] that did that. It is very much content marketing for their services.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557233

Here are a couple examples: https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemini-build

A lot of clubs in a lot of places scan and store your ID on entrance.

Indeed, Trump is a great example of democratic backsliding completely unfettered by "freedoms" often mistaken for the actual freedom. The way forward is being able to change things or regaining this ability if it's lost, not trying to carve out some bit that's not under the government's control yet. That's just a form of escapism.

You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing.

If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system.

If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR).

If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.

So what? Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.

Every remote communication could only be had in the clear. Everyone was fine with that. Was the US in the 80s a surveillance state?

Just a few decades years ago, everyone's names and phones in the US were freely available to anyone with a phone book. Communications were done in the clear, either via letters (hardly tamper-proof), or via phone (that anyone with access could tap).

Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?