jlarocco

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb...

> the airline said the chatbot was a "separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions".

And there are plenty of people in the maker movement who enjoy writing code, and will write it whether other people are vibe coding or not.

For 93 that's amazing.

Theoretically a person who read and memorized a book and then typed out copies for people would be violating the copyright, but so few people can do that, and it's so cumbersome that it just doesn't matter much. The copyright holder could sue if they found out the person were distributing copies, but it's just not realistic. Certainly not for a large number of books.

But AI memorization scales, and it's possible to have an AI write out unlimited copies of different books to a large number of people. And how did the AI get a full copy in the first place?

What's more insidious than just tracking people through the store is that the beacons can collect the bluetooth IDs of the devices they've seen and send it off to advertisers, who can use the UUID to connect a person's offline shopping with the online advertising profile they've built up for the person.

https://www.denverpost.com/2026/01/15/broncos-reporter-ai-fa...

Just dealing with fraud is a major problem in itself.

The whole point of using "static" in that way is to prevent people from using it outside of the file.

If you need to call a static function (inline or otherwise) from outside of the compilation unit to use the API, then it's a bug in the API, not a problem with static.

I agree with you about pre-processor macros, though.

I think C# and .Net are objectively better to use than Java or C++.

But the tooling and documentation is kind of a mess. Do you build with the "dotnet" command, or the "msbuild" command? When should you prefer "nuget restore" over "dotnet restore"? Should you put "<RestorePackagesConfig>true</RestorePackagesConfig>" in the .csproj instead? What's the difference between a reference and using Nuget to install a package? What's the difference between "Framework" and "Core"? Why, in 2026, do I still need to tell it not to prefer 32-bit binaries?

It's getting better, but there's still 20 years of documentation, how-to articles, StackOverflow Q&A, blogs, and books telling you to do old, broken, and out of date stuff, and finding good information about the specific version you're using can be difficult.

Admittedly, my perspective is skewed because I had never used C# and .Net before jumping in to a large .Net Framework project with hundreds of sub-projects developed over 15-20 years.

On the other hand, since they own GitHub they can (in theory) monitor the downloads, check for IPs belonging to businesses, and use it as evidence in piracy cases.

But yeah, if anybody can do it, the salaries are going to plummet. You don't need a CS degree to tell the AI to try again.

I didn't play it much, but when I did I'd play for 6+ hours at a time. I'll check this out later tonight, and might see if I can find the old CD and get the original running.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_(film)#Release

But it wouldn't hurt to have an option to make "e" to open files in Emacs or the user's choice of editor.

That's a task that I could automate as a developer, but other than LLM "vibe coding", I don't know that there's a good way for a lay person to automate it.

The evidence is pretty clear that Facebook wants to do everything they legally can to track and monitor people, and they're perfectly okay crossing the line and going to court to find the boundaries.

Using a company like that for encrypted messaging seems like an unnecessary risk. Maybe they're not decrypting it, but they're undoubtedly tracking everything else about the conversation because that's what they do.

Just one more reason I think the web is a dumpster fire, I guess.

If you're doing serious CAD work, like designing a whole machine, or working with multiple vendors to get parts manufactured, then it really is worth paying for a commercial CAD system and learning how to use it. All of the commercial CAD systems today support parametric modelling where later operations are updated automatically when the earlier operations are changed by the user.

If you insist on writing code, then even entry level systems like SolidWorks have APIs to do everything from creating the part geometry, defining geometric tolerances and PMI, running simulations, doing different types of analysis, creating machine/tooling instructions (G-code, etc.), exporting to various formats, and a million other things.

And they have workbenches for manufacturing techniques other than 3D printing, like sheet metal, CNC machining, cable routing, injection molding, welding, etc. And most of them have libaries of standard and off the shelf parts, like screws, bolts, nuts, washers, cables and housings, etc. in various standardized sizes so you don't have to model those at all.

For testing, on the higher end, the CAD systems integrate with metrology hardware and they're able to actually measure the manufactured parts and compare against the model to validate that they have the correct shape and meet all of the tolerances. Not as a virtual unit test running in CI, but by actually measuring the physical part.

To play devil's advocate, maybe there's a point where a product or service needs to stop evolving and just be.

I have a Vimeo account that's been on auto-resubscribe for years. I couldn't tell you a single feature they've added in the last 5 years, but they host my videos, collect stats, and let me send links to my friends, and that's really all I want.

In the past it made things easier for everybody to use the same currency, but is that still the case with modern electronic transactions?

Maybe it splinters into Euro, BRICS, and USD?

Most directly, when foreign products become more expensive, people may choose a local product that was previously seen as too expensive. So it generally has a negative effect on the foreign economy and boosts local production.

Unfortunately, it also drives the foreign companies to become more efficient so they can get their prices back down, while giving the local producers a crutch to justify higher prices and stagnate.

And there are other side effects, and all of the side-effects have side effects of their own. Economies are complicated.