willtemperley

It’s straight-up false advertising and they should be held accountable.

> Everything is safe if you know what you are doing sufficiently.

Exactly. If nothing is risk free then the original statement we’re discussing is untrue.

> it counts as "safe" for practical purposes

So not risk free.

This is just a truism though.

Of course if you don't do something you're never going to be at risk from whichever activity it was.

Some activities always have risk, for example ski-touring (backcountry if you're a Yank). If there's skiable snow, avalanche danger is never zero.

I wonder if people say these things, they actually believe it?

You make some wild generalisations there.

Can you back up your claims?

Have you actually been to Burning Man?

Using an LLM does not require people to stop understanding their codebases, and I find one of the best uses of an LLM is to improve my understanding of my code. I suspect the really good software is going to be written by those doing this, but time will tell.

I'm not angry, but yes I'm being deeply sarcastic to illustrate the extreme case you seem to be advocating, where we relinquish our understanding to the machines.

In a competitive business like software you need an unfair advantage and for very few people that's having near unlimited tokens. Even then I doubt that's going to produce good software.

I think it would be worth it for the sheer education and entertainment value.

Seeing the SR-71 still gives me the same buzz as when I read about it in books as a child 40 years ago. It reminds me how cool technology can be, when it increasingly isn't.

I also think it's pretty cool that arguably the most awesome aircraft in existence didn't have guns (I'm ignoring the YF-12).

Make Technology Cool Again.

> You really believe that alcohol is equivalent to water in its toxicity?

No! At what point did I imply that? Can you please stop trolling.

If you want to discuss, let's go point-by-point. What do you think about TFAs in wine?

https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6304/14/6/454

You are correct of course.

You could also have just glanced at the rest of the thread where I've given far more specific evidence.

I'm rather glad I've drawn people's attention to the issue, despite having to endure extremely patronising comments like yours.

Second, I clearly have skin-in-the-game here because you did read the first comment, so everyone that thinks it's OK to make jokes like the dihydrongen monoxide one (well done that was clever in 2015) can go forth and multiply.

I'm not really making any strong claims except that people should look into the chemicals in wine. It's a complicated story. Unfortunately many of the USDA links are dead so this is the best evidence I have for the difference in wine standards in Europe vs the US.

https://www.winespectator.com/articles/us-and-europe-have-di...

They're making a far stronger counter claim:

> there are plenty people who drink a bottle of white, red and/or rose for lunch here their entire lives to old age.

The labelling standards are a lot stricter in the US:

https://www.winespectator.com/articles/us-and-europe-have-di...

I told an anecdote for illustrative purposes and made no explicit links. Others have assumed the link however.

My purpose was to draw people's attention to some lesser known aspects of the wine industry which I think are consequential, and I was illustrating I have some insignts into this that people that haven't worked in the industry probbaly don't.

> GP seem to imply it was the other chemicals

I didn't draw any conclusions or make a link, you assumed the link.

Let's look at some evidence instead. There are very high levels of TFA in wine:

https://www.pan-europe.info/press-releases/2025/04/study-rev...

It'll be decades before we know the true effects of the chemicals other than alcohol that are evidently present in wine, but TFA is known to pose serious health risks.

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

I find there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in people who are partial to a bottle or two, they tend to hang on to the myths that it's good for them.

The point is the chemical levels in the wine. The anecdote about my father is just that. Please don’t trivialise that just to point score, it’s bad taste.

I used the anecdote to illustrate I have some experience in the wine industry, having worked hands on for a few years. My father studied chemistry at Cambridge so his understanding of wine chemistry is, or was, expert level.

I’d say the burden of proof is on you though, can you supply epidemiological evidence that wine isn’t harmful to health, if you’re going to advocate for the alcohol industry?

I'm not surprised.

There's untold levels of chemicals in wine. Organic wine is BS in Europe, organic vineyards actually use more chemicals like giant quantities of copper sulphate. The US is actually a lot better than Europe in this regard.

Source: My father owned a vineyard in France before he keeled over with a subarachnoid haematoma after drinking 3 glasses of Rose at lunchtime.

The latency is a bit higher, but IP over Avian Carrier would be cheaper than this.

> Another thing to think about is, what would it take for you to care less about the understanding

Yes please, I'd like to not understand my codebase, give up my decades of experience and have a machine do everything for me. That way I can let captialism utterly steamroller me because of my paltry token stack, in comparison to the 19 year old vibe coder who has secured a new funding round for ponzi.ai

I had to double check if this was an Onion article or not.

Oh dear. I appear to still be stuck in the onionverse.

Looks like Microsoft were listening to Ink & Switch and borrowed their multiple-values-in-a-cell idea.

Feb 2025: https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/

September 2026: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/excelblog/excel-now...

I think this underlines the core problem. It's really hard to make a fully informed choice of provider based on costs, and they deliberately make multi-cloud expensive.

Egress costs are fairly clearly a vendor lock in strategy. If I want to transfer 1TB to run on cheaper compute at another provider, that costs me $90 (edit) on AWS as opposed to $0.24 at wholesale prices. It's unlikely to be cost effective so I choose AWS compute.

EDIT: thanks to someonebaggy for pointing out my decimal point error.

Ninety dollars to transfer a terabyte is clearly ridiculous.

> CloudFlare is not a tier 1 cloud provider.

Yes, you're legally correct, but the point is AWS are clearly overcharging for egress.

As you say:

> Egress pricing pays for the AWS network infrastructure that is incredibly reliable (hardware failures happen regularly yet almost no one notices) and allows it to operate at scale sufficient to absorb even the largest DDoS attacks.

Cloudflare is also pretty good at absorbing DDoS attacks, yet charge no egress costs.

Maybe the real question is, are the tier-1 providers colluding in overcharging for egress?

Cloudflare R2 has zero egress fees.

> Is there a meeting happening anywhere right this minute that I’m supposed to be in?

Nothing about this is groundbreaking and could have been written in BASIC.

I grew up on BASIC using a BBC Micro in the 80s, using a QWERTY keyboard and a screen. Some decades later I'm using a QWERTY keyboard and a screen with a few more pixels. I'm betting nothing will change much. An OS will do OS things, just a lot faster and more securely.

Spreadsheets will still be useful for making deterministic calculations about finances. It will just no longer take 100 engineers to build one.

GIS software will continue to use deterministic algorithms for calculating areas because it's a useful function but, hopefully it will get more user friendly.

> The sheer surface area that AI can create in our intellectual life is limitless

I agree with this statement, though I think this Brave New World is incredibly exciting to some and dystopian to others. The former group might include those that value the intellectual process above financial reward and status.

The flip side is there are many people, especially in tech, where their area of expertise has evaporated along with their lucrative and previously high status careers. It used to be possible to have a technical job by essentially following recipes and it turns out AI is far better at that than a human.

The linked article lays out why human understanding of mathematical models remains essential and I think the same applies to software. We're gonna need more software engineers who are able to think critically.

Saying that "Claude found" this is very creepy.

Not once in the article did they mention the humans involved in this.

If you scroll to the bottom, click on the small link in the second last paragraph you'll find a technical report that acknowledges the humans involved:

https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/22573675ada52a8ca8a97a1a4b4326...

I thought the point of this article is that unsuitable technology and the associated loss of personal agency is seriously affecting the mental health of doctors, yet none of the comments here seem to reflect that.

I really recommend Nicorette inhalers, that's how I quit smoking. Having something to do with the hands really helps I think.

Also just inhaling through an empty tube helps! Make the smoking motion with your hand, inhale and get a nice hit of oxygen.

Who in their right mind would install a Meta AI with near admin privileges?

RNZ is an unusually pleasant website.