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Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: August 7th, 2025
  • Governments and banks love this, but I’ve even seen it with phone companies with e-sims. I quickly needed a new phone subscription, so I considered an e-sim, because I figured you could activate it by scanning the QR code from the screen. But no, they will mail me a piece of plastic with the QR code on it. So I went with a regular sim instead.

  • I admit I haven’t been keeping up recently. These are relatively new changes then. I remember when a transaction cost $25 and 7 minutes. (Or was it the other way around?) In any case, that wasn’t practical for anyone except organised crime, which is largely where it got that reputation. And the fact that crime is still a major user.

  • My company pushes it too. It’s useful for some things, but you really have to be aware of its limitations. The same is true of Claude of course, but I have less problems letting Claude touch my code. The free GPT models work better as an interactive rubber duck or an interactive encyclopedia.

  • That is exactly the problem. I understand people using AI to make things. I don’t understand blindly publishing AI slop without verifying it’s correct.

    Everybody using genAI has to understand that AI will often be wrong, and frequently ridiculous, and that it’s up to you to ensure that what you deliver is correct.

    And because nobody likes to review other people’s work (most people are terrible and sloppy reviewers), it’s better to put yourself in the center: have AI propose ideas or review the result, but you make the thing. That’s how you ensure everything passes through your hands.

  • That’s significantly worse. Assembling a PC without knowing what a cooler is for is bad enough, but to actually cut pieces off complex electronic components, I don’t know what kind of state of mind you have to be in for that.

  • I can live without documentation and comments, but then you’ve got to write really well-structured, self-documenting code. Which means long variable names (or better: local constants) that describe exactly what’s in them, and function names that describe clearly what the function is for, and readable code that shows what it does.

    But perhaps expecting that kind of discipline from people who lack the discipline to write documentation, was not entirely realistic.