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Some European countries, including UK, have enough of a strong network of local supermarkets and department stores that Amazon is simply not necessary. I have not used Amazon in the last five years. Most of my family and friends rarely use it either.

There is little reason to when you can walk into a supermarket or department store, often with three or five of them within 1000 feet, and buy what you need at the normal marked price. If you cannot go there yourself, most of them offer home delivery anyway. You also know who you are buying from, you do not have to worry about questionable third-party sellers, and if there is a problem you can telephone a human being or simply walk back into the shop. What is not to like?

But yeah, not every city or country is lucky enough to have such a strong retail network. Amazon makes sense in many parts of the world. But I also think its success in those places is a sad indicator of weak local infra and underinvestment in local retail.

The world would probably be an economically healthier place if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores, and indie shops. It keeps more money circulating locally, supports more local jobs and improves local economy instead of funnelling all the money through one gigantic company.

In the UK, most people simply get Bupa dental insurance. A basic plan costs like 25 pounds per month. Affordable I'd say. Many people spend more than that on beer and public transport.

I know that does not help someone who has become homeless or lost their job and cannot afford the 25 pounds a month (300 pounds a year). That is why I say it is important for people who are employed to get a Bupa insurance plan. Most people do that anyway. This reduces the burden on the NHS Dental and help provide free dental treatment for people who genuinely need it.

For non-dental medical issues, I think the NHS is pretty good. When I lived in UK, I always got same-day appointments for routine check-ups and same-week appointments for more complex investigations.

> I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want. I read a statistic that in Europe and Canada you have to make those kinds of routine appointments months in advance.

Can you share a reference for that statistics?

FWIW, I live in Europe and I always got dentist appointments within a week. For a severe issue (pain involved), I got appointment on the same day.

Never underestimate the power of hubris.

Related petition to be debated in parliament: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/757233

All fair points. Sorry, I spend a lot of time on regional forums, and I had a brain malfunction and forgot that when I write on HN, I am writing on a worldwide forum. Sorry for the unnecessary nitpicking.

Re non profit, I do donate to a few nonprofits I like, like those working on fediverse and my favorite langs. But I don't know of anything that does this for extensions. I'd have definitely voted with money if something was there. So, yeah, no, I am not doing anything to start a nonprofit for extensions. You have a good point.

> It’s like calling surgeons extortionists for having the gall to charge for treating you. Yes, ideally that should be free and available to all

What do you mean by "should be"? Surgery is free and available to everyone. So why would one accuse surgeons of being extortionists? So I am not sure how the surgeon comparison works. That example supports the parent commenter's point that these extensions should be free.

Of course, there is still the practical question of who will do the work and how they will make a living. We can do what we do for surgeons. Maybe have a nonprofit consortium that people fund, so that it can support the extension developers. Yes, people would be spending money either way, but at least that money would be going toward a larger cause. Just like we pay taxes so the government can fund surgeons, who can then treat people.

I don't know if there is another industry that behaves this childishly. There might be. But good grief, how much more juvenile can ours possibly get? AI-generated images with obviously nonsensical text is something I never thought I'd see in professional meetings. But it is becoming more and more common.

I am sure I am not alone in observing that starting around 2020... may be even a few years earlier... Google seemed to hire a lot of middle managers. I personally knew several managers who did not seem to contribute much beyond "organizing" meetings, and I saw them all join Google one by one.

It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline.

How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives.

I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.

I mean no disrespect. This is more of a rant at how things are today. It is telling that over-complicated solutions have become so common that, for the current generation of devs, Kubernetes is the obvious way of doing stuff and a simple systemd service is the obscure one. I am sure there are good reasons for this, but it still feels like a loss when simplicity is no longer obvious.

Way to find something negative in everything.

Congratulations on derailing what was otherwise such a nice thread. Well done.

Not everyone in this world is always on edge like you. It is OK to be cheesy sometimes. Humor exists for a reason. Not every unconventional interaction is creepy. Get over yourself, please.

You should read the original article by Dawkins that this piece is critiquing: https://archive.is/Rq5bw

I don't know if the original article casts him in a better light. I think it does not. But it is still worth reading so you can see the context for yourself and judge whether the criticism in this article is fair.

> What can "own" possibly mean in this context?

This sounds unnecessarily reductive. By "own" I would mean that I can re-read the book again and again and again as many times as I want as long as I take good care of the book and prevent it from disintegrating.

But the DRM e-books can't be used like that. That was their point.

I really had fun with this one. You know what would make it even cosier? Being able to choose a small avatar for ourselves. The mouse pointer as your icon feels a very impersonal at the moment. Having avatars would make it feel more like we're all hanging out together in this wonderland.

> Lots of negativity in the comments and while I'm as distrusting of VC funding as the next guy I think competition in this space is something we should encourage, and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point.

What you are calling "negativity" are genuine concerns to me. I was excited at the headline first. But as soon as I found it is VC-funded, it became a complete non-starter for me.

Look, I'm going to make my labor of love available to the world on your platform. I'm not going to earn a dime from it. It's just free work I'm gonna put out there. If I'm going to do that, I'll choose a platform where I can be reasonably sure that there won't be a rug pull 5 years down the line.

The problem with VC-funded projects is that there is definitely going to be some kind of rug-pull. Because the investors need their money.

The Git hosting services I use today are those where I can pay as a paying customer or I can pay as a paying member. As a paying customer, I know what I am getting into. As a paying member, I have the right to vote on decisions that affect the platform.

> Please don't give your users a nickname like "tanglers", groups come up with their own nicknames.

What prompted this? I can't see "tanglers" in the OP. Did you see them calling their users "tanglers" somewhere? Honest question.

> There's a growing demand for single user or smaller scoped apps where giving LLM agents direct access means velocity. The failure/rollback model is much easier with these as long as we have good backup hygiene.

This makes no sense to me. For anything that has sensitive payment or personally identifieable data, direct access to DB is potentially illegal.

> The failure/rollback model is much easier with these as long as we have good backup hygiene.

Have you actually operated systems like this in production? Even reverting to a DB state that is only seconds old can still lose hundreds or thousands of transactions. Which means loads of unhappy customers. More realistically, recovery points are often minutes or hours behind once you factor in detection, validation and operational overhead.

DB revert is for exceptional disaster recovery scenarios, not something you want in normal day-to-day operations. If you are saying that you want to give LLM full access to prod DB and then revert every time it makes a mistake, you aren't running a serious business.

> Nobody seems to care or notice. I'm watching in disbelief how nobody is pointing out the article is full of inaccuracies.

I don't know. I finished my graduate studies in math a few years ago, and pretty much every textbook by well-known mathematicians was packed with errors. I just stopped caring so much about inaccuracies. Every math book is going to have them. Human beings are imperfect, and great mathematicians are no exception. I'd just download the errata from the uni website and keep it open while reading.

> That is simply not the theorem.

> The article is plain wrong.

> This does not excuse the article from reversing the meaning of the theorem.

What's with this hyperbole? Even the best math books have loads of errors (typographical, factual, missing conditions, insufficient reasoning, incorrect reasoning, ...). Just look at any errata list published by any university for their set books! Nobody does this kind of hyperbole for errors in math books. Only on HN do you see this kind of takedown, which is frankly very annoying. In universities, professors and students just publish errata and focus on understanding the material, not tearing it down with such dismissive tone. It's totally unnecessary.

I don't know if you've got an axe to grind here or if you're generally this dismissive but calling it "simply not the theorem" or "plain wrong" is a very annoying kind of exaggeration that misses all nuance and human fallibility.

Yes, the precise statement of Birkhoff's representation theorem involves down-sets of the poset of join-irreducibles. Yes, the article omits that. I agree that it is imprecise.

But it's not "reversing the meaning". It still correctly points to reconstructing the lattice via an inclusion order built from join-irreducibles. What's missing is a condition. It is sloppy wording but not a fundamental error like you so want us to believe.

Feels like the productive move here is just to suggest the missing wording to the author. I'm sure they'll appreciate it. I don't really get the impulse to frame it as a takedown and be so dismissive when it's a small fix.

> The main SDL maintainer is paid by a US for-profit company, Valve. They don't necessarily share your EU = automatically good attitude.

I'm not sure how one follows from the other. I am paid by a US for-profit company. But I still think EU has done some things better. People's beliefs are not determined by the company they work for. It would be a very sad world if people couldn't think outside the bubble of their employers.

Why are these projects still on Github? Isn't it better to move away from Github than go through all this shenanigans? This AI slopam nonsense isn't going to stop. Github is no longer the "social network" for software dev. It's just a vehicle to shove more and more Copilot stuff.

The userbase is also changing. There are vast numbers of new users on Github who have no desire to learn the architecture or culture of the project they are contributing to. They just spin up their favorite LLM and make a PR out of whatever slop comes out.

At this point why not move to something like Codeberg? It's based in Europe. It's run by a non-profit. Good chance it won't suffer from the same fate a greedy corporate owned platform would suffer?

Yes, how dare someone take an idea, develop it, and publish it outside the algorithm-driven rage pit. Truly terrible behavior! /s

Expanding a thought beyond 280 characters and publishing it somewhere other than the X outrage machine is something we should be encouraging.

> This article is describing a problem that is still two steps removed from where AI code becomes actually useful.

But it does a good job of countering the narrative you often see on LinkedIn, and to some extent on HN as well, where AI is portrayed as all-capable of developing enterprise software. If you spend any time in discussions hyping AI, you will have seen plenty of confident claims that traditional coding is dead and that AI will replace it soon. Posts like this is useful because it shows a more grounded reality.

> 90 percent of the things users want either A) dont exist or B) are impossible to find, install and run without being deeply technical. These things dont need to scale, they dont need to be well designed. They are for the most part targeted, single user, single purpose, artifacts.

Yes, that is a particular niche where AI can be applied effectively. But many AI proponents go much further and argue that AI is already capable of delivering complex, production-grade systems. They say, you don't need engineers anymore. They say, you only need product owners who can write down the spec. From what I have seen, that claim does not hold up and this article supports that view.

Many users may not be interested in scalability and maintainability... But for a number of us, including the OP and myself, the real question is whether AI can handle situations where scalability, maintainability and sound design DO actually matter. The OP does a good job of understanding this.

Does any one of this help me if Claude runs `git reset --hard`?

If I am working in a sandbox, I have uncommitted changes in a sandbox and if Claude runs `git reset --hard` on those uncommitted changes in the sandbox, I've got the same problem?

> Care about the data in that workspace? Push it first.

But you're changing the problem. If I push everything, then yeah I've got no problem. But between pushing one change and the next, you're gonna have uncommitted changes, won't you? and if Claude runs `git reset --hard` at that time, same problem, isn't it?

This! The safeguards need to be outside LLM and they need to be deterministic.

Now I wish I could reject `git reset --hard` on my local system somehow.

Yes, if something is reproducible and undesirable, it is a bug and RLHF can reduce it. I'm not disupting that. "reduce" is the keyword here. You can't eliminate them entirely.

My point is that fixing one bug does not eliminate the class of bugs. Heck, it does not even fix that one bug deterministically. You only reduce its probability like you rightly said.

With git commands, there is not like a system like Lean that can formally reject invalid proofs. Really I think the mathematicians have got it easier with LLMs because a proof is either valid or invalid. It's not so clear cut with git commands. Almost any command can be valid in some narrow context, which makes it much harder to reject undesirable outputs entirely.

Until the underlying probabilities of undesirable output become negligible so much that they become practically impossible, these kinds of issues will keep surfacing even if you address individual bugs. Will the probabilities become so low someday that these issues are practically impossible? Maybe. But we are not there yet. Until then, we should recalibrate our expectations and rely on deterministic safeguards outside the LLM.

Yes, exactly. People often overlook that, even with guardrails, it is still probabilities all the way down.

You can reduce the risk, but not drive it to zero, and at scale even very small failure rates will surface.

> It is meaningless to say that because the author was able to reproduce it multiple times.

I don't know how that refutes what I'm saying.

The behaviour was reproduced multiple times, so it is clearly an observable outcome, not a one-off. It just shows that the probability of `git reset --hard` is > 0 even with RLHF and post-training.

> Just by a thing being common in training data doesn't mean it will be produced.

That's not what I said at all. I never said it will be produced. I said there is some probability of it being produced.

> False, it goes against the RL/HF and other post training goals.

It is correct that frequency in training data alone does not determine outputs, and that post-training (RLHF, policies, etc.) is meant to steer the model away from undesirable behavior.

But those mechanisms do not make such outputs impossible. They just make them less likely. The underlying system is still probabilistic and operating with incomplete context.

I am not sure how you can be so confident that a probabilistic model would never produce `git reset --hard`. There is nothing inherent in how LLMs work that makes that sequence impossible to generate.

Isn't this a natural consequence of how these systems work?

The model is probabilistic and sequences like `git reset --hard` are very common in training data, so they have some probability to appear in outputs.

Whether such a command is appropriate depends on context that is not fully observable to the system, like whether a repository or changes are disposable or not. Because of that, the system cannot rely purely on fixed rules and has to figure intent from incomplete information, which is also probabilistic.

With so many layers of probabilities, it seems expected that sometimes commands like this will be produced even if they are not appropriate in that specific situation.

Even a 0.01% failure rate due to context corruption, misinterpretation of intent, or guardrail errors would show up regularly at scale, that is like 1 in 10000 queries.