It's like when management does something stupid and then engineering works overtime to keeps the system working. Of course management learns nothing and all outside observers don't even notice something went wrong.
There is a limit to how much engineers working overtime can do to offset management stupidity and when you reach the limit the bottom falls out. Of course then everybody blames the engineers...
I'm certain there is a way to verify age without compromise of privacy or identity. I'm sure it's possible to build some oAuth like flow that could allow sites to verify both human-ness and age. The systems and corporations that gate that MUST (in the RFC sense) be separate from the systems and corporations that want the verification.
Do we need laws to make this happen? What methods can be used to aid adoption? Do site operators really want to know the humanness and ages or are those just masks on adding more surveillance?
When I review the link posted by @dang it says talking about downvotes is boring. Maybe that's why your comment is grey. (This comment should turn grey as well)
I've been getting "Emails aren’t getting through to one of your email addresses. Please update or confirm your email." -- even tho I get messages from them every day. When you press the button to confirm the (working) email it states "Something went wrong".
It happened last week too, I was able to fix it via their chat-help (human). Yesterday, their chat-help (human) was not able fix it and has to open a ticket. I pay for LinkedIn-Premium. So maybe this is just a scam to route me into Verification. Their help documents (https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1423367) for verifying emails doesn't match the current user experience.
Then, in a classic tech-paradox, their phone support person told me they would email me -- on the same address their system reports emails are not getting through to. It felt like 1996 levels of understanding.
I have no proof but I have suspicions that call-center systems are designed like this on purpose. low-level employees are hamstrung in what they can do, so then they have to hand it off to someone else, with varying degrees of ceremony, which either involves submitting a "ticket" or transferring you to some other department who may or may not have higher privileges wrt what they can do to help you.
Then you might hit a wall where nobody can do anything because you're trapped in the gears of some byzantine IT system that decides what can and can't happen at any given time with any given situation.
Then there's the labyrinth of the phone system itself littered low-bit smooth jazz and awful menus not often alleviated by AI voice recognition (which in my experience can sometimes be worse than the older voice systems) and the back and forth from one department to the next either because of the above or because someone or something keeps sending you to the wrong people to get your problems addressed.
If it's not engineered, it's some kinda emergent eldritch abomination that has slowly accreted over the decades.
Good idea -- I've not loaded images since...ever, I still prefer the text/plain part. Like an idiot I assumed they were getting an error message from the MTA. But then what if they deliver but I never open?
I want that to be how things work, although recent history has not been favorable when it comes to Public Key Infrastructure as applied to individuals. Inconvenience, foot-guns, required technical expertise levels, the pain of revocation lists...
In a sense, it seems Accellerando got a lot more right than not ( reputation markets in this particular case ). We may be arguing over the best way to do it, but it seems that the conclusion was already drawn.
To be fair, it was something of a marketing master stroke to adopt claw as a symbol. Admittedly, it does make me uneasy the same way Kamala's writers dressed her up in Lisa Simpson's clothes ( episode when she is a president ), but... you have a point. We are a weird mix of pop culture memes becoming so intertwined it is hard to separate them at times.
Someone here recommended Accelerando about a month ago - I’m sitting in an airport now reading it. It’s… deep. Probably one of the two deepest sci-fi novels I’ve ever read, beat only by Blindsight.
I’m not finished yet though, so that order could change :)
I read it after Prime Intellect during my AI binge. I think the initial feeling I got from it was the same as I did during first read of Snow Crash. Familiar world, and yet everything is very, very different so you feel more like an explorer than anything else.
They just pay into ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. The royalty groups disburse on estimated airplay. Non-coms pay a reduced rate. I can go mch deeper if you want. I used to work in that field.
At KPFT I endured the transition a number of years ago where we had to log every song played and nothing like that had ever been required since the beginning.
For terrestrial broadcast or online? You go through a handful of music industry organizations such as ASCAP and BMI. For terrestrial broadcast the costs are scaled to approximate listenership.
Voting, much like all other things in Estonia such as getting married/divorced, doing taxes, signing documents, starting/closing companies, notary dealings, bank dealings, selling/buying vehicles, and many more things I can't even think of right now are entirely done via the digital ID that every citizen has. This means that you authorize/sign actions with it, including voting, because only you have your private keys (either in your personal ID card, in your phone's sim card, etc) that you yourself know the PIN for, which then authenticates you as being you. I think we're now at a point where there isn't a single government or business dealing you can not do entirely online (https://e-estonia.com/solutions/).
Phones and sim cards a lot more temporary than ID cards. I don't know of a lot of theves that target ID cards for their authorization uses. Phones... people will steal those.
You can close your Mobile-ID when your phone gets stolen so the security keys on it will be useless, and even if you don't close it, nobody can use your security keys without your PIN, which is in your head.
There’s also digi-ID (similar e-signature certificate on a card, but without any ID features), Mobiil-ID (e-signature on a SIM-card, no idea how it works), Smart-ID (in app, tied to secure storage in Android/iOS, cross-signed by the server which is supposed to check the device somehow) and probably something else I don’t remember. All of these are independent options, so you can, for example, revoke your Mobiil-ID if you lose your phone, and still use the your main ID card to sign things.
Wow, that is definitely more sophisticated than we have in the states. It seems like you can use it for things that one would otherwise need a notary for, that is such a timesaver.
It costs as much as your ID card costs by the government, and lasts as long as well. They are one and the same. Applying for a new ID card / national ID document in Estonia costs 35€ and the document is valid for 5 years. If you forget your PIN code, you can reset it with your PUK codes, but if you also lose your PUK codes you need to apply for a new ID card. The process for getting a new ID card from the moment you applied for it takes no more than 30 days. You can also have it fast tracked for 250€ and get it in 2 days.
But, like the parent said, you have many other options other than the physical ID-card as well. Most people these days use Mobiil-ID or SmartID, which works on your phone and even smart watch. SmartID is completely free and Mobiil-ID is tied to your phones carrier, so the cost varies, but it's a one-time set-up fee of around 5€. Mobiil-ID certificate also lasts 5 years.
Which measure? Like when folk say something is more "efficient" it's more time-efficient to fly but one trades other efficiency. Efficiency, like productivity needs a second word with it to properly communicate.
Whtys more productive? Lines of code (a weak measure). Features shipped? Bugs fixed? Time by company saved? Time for client? Shareholders value (lame).
I don't know the answer but this year (2026) I'm gonna see if LLM is better at tax prep than my 10yr CPA. So that test is my time vs $6k USD.
Time could be very expensive as mistakes on taxes can be fraud resulting in prison time. Mostly they understand people make mistakes - but they need to look like honest mistakes and llm may not. remember you sign your taxes as correct to the best of your knowledge - your CPA is admitting you outsourced understanding to an expert, something they accept. However if you sign alone you are saying you understand it all even if you don't.
These days productivity at a macroeconomic scale is usually cited in something like GDP per hour worked.
Most recent BLS for the last quarter ‘25 was an annualized rate of 5.4%.
The historic annual average is around 2%.
It’s a bit early to draw a conclusion from this. Also it’s not an absolute measure. GDP per hour worked. So, to cut through any proxy factors or intermediating signals you’d really need to know how many hours were worked, which I don’t have to hand.
That said, in general macro sense, assuming hours worked does not decrease, productivity +% and gdp +% are two of the fundamental factors required for real world wage gains.
If you’re looking for signals in either direction on AI’s influence on the economy, these are #s to watch, among others. The Federal Reserve, the the Chair reports after each meeting, is (IMO) one of the most convenient places to get very fresh hard #s combined with cogent analysis and usually some q&a from the business press asking questions that are at least some of the ones I’d want to ask.
If you follow these fairly accessible speeches after meetings, you’ll occasionally see how lots of the things in them end up being thematic in lots of the stories that pop up here weeks or months later.
Economy-wide productivity can be measured reasonably well, although there are a few different measures [1]. The big question I guess is whether AI will make a measurable impact there. Historically tech has had less impact than people thought it would, as noted in Robert Solow's classic quip that "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". [2]
Number of features shipped. Traction metrics. Revenue per product. Ultimately business metrics. For example, tax prep effectiveness would be a proper experiment tied to specific metrics.
I hear this every day, and I'm sure its true sometimes, but where is the tsunami of amazing software LLM users are producing?
Where are the games that make the old games look like things from a bygone era?
Where are the updates to the software that I currently use that greatly increase it capabilities? I have seen none of this.
I get that it takes a long time to make software, but people were making big promises a year ago and I think its time to start expecting some results.
Reddit and GitHub are littered with people launching new projects and appear to be way more feature-rich than new tool/app launches from previous years. I think it is a lot harder to get noticed with a new tool/app new because of this increase in volume of launches.
Also weekend hackathon events have completely/drastically changed as an experience in the last 2-3 years (expectations and also feature-set/polish of working code by the end of the weekend).
I’d be interested where you’re getting your data. SteamDB shows an accelerating trend of game releases over time, though comparing January 2026 to January 2025 directly shows a marginal gain [0].
This chart from a16z (scroll down to “App Store, Engage”) plots monthly iOS App Store releases each month and shows significant growth [1].
> After basically zero growth for the past three years, new app releases surged 60% yoy in December (and 24% on a trailing twelve month basis).
It’s completely anecdotal evidence but my own personal experience shows various sub-Reddit’s just flooded with AI assisted projects now, so much so that various pages have started to implement bans or limits of AI related posts (r/selfhosted just did this).
As far as _amazing software_ goes, that’s all a bit subjective. But there is definitely an increase happening.
I got the numbers swapped. Turns out there was an increase of about 40 games between last January and this. Which is exactly what you wouldn’t expect if the 5-10x claims are true.
Also the accelerating trend dates back to 2018 if you remove the early COVID dip. Which is exactly my point. You can look at the graph and there is no noticeable impact correlated to any major AI advancements.
The iOS data is interesting. But it’s an outlier because the Play Store and Steam show nothing similar. And the iOS App Store is weird because they’ve had numerous periods of negative growth follow by huge positive growth over the years. My guess is that it probably has more to do with all of the VC money flowing into AI startups and all the small teams following the hype building wrappers and post training existing models. If you look at a random sample of the iOS new apps that looks likely.
Seriously go to the App Store,
search AI and scroll until you get bored. There are literally thousands of AI API wrappers.
Specifically about custom CUDA kernels, I’ve implemented them with AI that significantly sped up the code in this project I worked on. Didn’t know how to code these kernels at all, but I implemented and tested a couple of variations and got it running fast in just two days. Basically impossible for me before AI coding (well not impossible but it would have taken me many weeks, so I wouldn’t have tried it).
The one thing AI is consistently better at than humans is shipping quickly. It will give you as much slop as you want right away, and if you push on it for a short period of time it will compile and if you run it a program will appear that has a button for each of the requested features.
Then you start asking questions like, does the button for each of the features actually do the thing? Are there any race conditions? Are there inputs that cause it to segfault or deadlock? Are the libraries it uses being maintained by anyone or are they full of security vulnerabilities? Is the code itself full of security vulnerabilities? What happens if you have more than 100 users at once? If the user sets some preferences, does it actually save them somewhere, and then load them back properly on the next run? If the preferences are sensitive, where is it saving them and who has access to it?
It's way easier to get code that runs than code that works.
Or to put it another way, AI is pretty good at writing the first 90% of the code:
"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
Look somewhere outside of the AI hype space. You’re seeing more AI competitors because it’s easy to build on top of someone’s existing model or API and everyone is trying to cash in. You saw the same thing with new crypto currency.
That’s an incredibly niche area. From their website it looks like there are 4k modules available. Is there a way to see historical data. Also is number of users available, so that you can rule out popularity growth?
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