That’s the deep irony of technology IMHO, that innovation follows Conway's law on a meta layer: White collar workers inevitably shaped high technology after themselves, and instead of finally ridding humanity of hard physical labour—as was the promise of the Industrial Revolution—we imitate artists, scientists, and knowledge workers.
We can now use natural language to instruct computers generate stock photos and illustrations that would take a professional artist a few years ago, discover new molecule shapes, beat the best Go players, build the code for entire applications, or write documents of various shapes and lengths—but painting a wall? An unsurmountable task that requires a human to execute reliably, not even talking about economics.
One reason may be that it makes it a lot easier to open up a product to AI. Instead of adding a bad ChatGPT UI clone into your app, you inverse control and let external AI tools interact with your application and its data, thus giving your customers immediate benefits, while simultaneously sating your investors/founders/managers desire to somehow add AI.
The other thing OP presents is very different from any eID scheme in terms of anonymity. You'd show an ID to a human at the counter and even if the seller stores your info somehow, it can't be linked to the token they sold to you. The required infrastructure is minimal and relatively simplistic. The only drawback is that being anonymous means it's easy to resell tokens.
An eID system links your real life identity to any use of the eID online. Anyone who thinks there's a math or technology that fixes this misses the fact that it's the trust in the humans (companies, institutions, governments) who operate these systems is misplaced. Math and technology are implemented by people so there are many opportunities to abuse these systems. And once in place I guarantee, without any shadow of doubt that sooner or later, fast or slow, it will be expanded to any online action.
I will take anonymity and the small minority of kids who will find a loophole to access some adult-only stuff over the inevitable overreach and abuse against the large majority of people whose every online move will be traced and logged.
> The only drawback is that being anonymous means it's easy to resell tokens.
That’s a pretty major flaw. These tokens will be sold with markup on black markets, rendering the whole system unfit for its intended purpose.
Additionally, in line of drawbacks, buying porn scratch cards will be stigmatised, because everyone will (think they) know what you’ll use them for. Are you comfortable doing it in front of your teenage child, neighbor, crush, grandma, or spouse?
> Math and technology are implemented by people so there are many opportunities to abuse these systems.
And yet we have functioning asymmetric cryptography systems that enable secure encryption for billions of people, despite malevolent actors having a clear incentive to subvert that, much more so than age verification tokens.
> […] the inevitable overreach and abuse against the large majority of people whose every online move will be traced and logged.
This is happening right now already, in a scale hardly imaginable.
> These tokens will be sold with markup on black markets,
Black markets catering to minors aren't very large or profitable. No adult needs to buy from this black market. How big is the black market for beer for teenagers? Yes, some reselling will happen, just as minors sometimes get alcohol or tobacco from older friends and siblings. Prosecute anyone involved. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough without sacrificing privacy.
> buying porn scratch cards will be stigmatised
There was once a time, in living memory, when people had Playboy and Hustler mailed to their houses. You're overthinking it. And also why would the seller assume it's for adult content instead of social media?
> Are you comfortable doing it in front of your teenage child, neighbor, crush, grandma, or spouse?
So don't do it in front of them? You're allowed to go to stores alone.
I have less than zero interest in this, or any, business. I don't have any interested friends either. Any other baseless accusations you want to throw at me?
> It’s not a problem that needs to be solved by building a market for porn licenses.
You're blind if you can't see the rising wave of legislation that will make us upload ID to use the internet to "protect the children". The problem being solved is "protect the children without uploading ID".
You seem to stick on the idea that someone will make you upload your ID, while every initiative working on this issue is moving toward cryptographic proof of ownership without ever disclosing your identity to the age verification API nor the service you requested access to to the government.
The government API, the legislation around it all, the legal framework for the gift card issuers, the public education necessary, and on and on — there’s lots of complexity hidden in those "gift cards".
Well. I was a sceptic for a long time, but a friend recently convinced me to try Claude Code and showed me around. I revived an open source project I regularly get back to, code for a bit, have to wrestle with toil and dependency updates, and loose the joy before I really get a lot done, so I stop again.
With Claude, all it took to fix all of that drudge was a single sentence. In the last two weeks, I implemented several big features, fixed long standing issues and did migrations to new major versions of library dependencies that I wouldn’t have tackled at all on my own—I do this for fun after all, and updating Zod isn’t fun. Claude just does it for me, while I focus on high-level feature descriptions.
I’m still validating and tweaking my workflow, but if I can keep up that pace and transfer it to other projects, I just got several times more effective.
This sounds to me like a lack of resource management, as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring.
As a creator of an open-source platform myself, I find trusting a semi-random word generator in front of users unreliable.
Moreover, I believe it creates a bad habit. I've seen developers forget how to read documentation and instead trust AI, and of course, as a result AI makes mistakes that are hard to debug or provokes security issues that are easy to overlook.
I know this sounds like a luddite talking, but I'm still not convinced that AI in its current state can be reliable in any way. However, because of engineers like you, AI is learning to make better choices, and that might change in the future.
I think AI coding should not be permitted in the first two years of training in CS. One should have to learn the basics of reading quality documentation, creating quality code and documentation, learning how the different pieces of software work together, and learning how to work with others.
LLMs are great for people with some idea of what they're doing, and need "someone else" to pair program with. I agree it will cripple the architectural thinking of new learners if they never learn how to think about code on their own.
> as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring.
Yeah this sounds interesting, and matches my experience a bit. I was trying out AI for the Christmas cuz people I know are talking about it. I asked it to implement something (refactoring for better performance) that I think should be simple, it did that and looks amazing, all tests passed too! When I look into the implementation, AI got the shape right, but the internals were more complicated than needed and were wrong. Nonetheless it got me started into fixing things, and it got fixed quite quickly.
The performance of the model in this case is not great, perhaps it is also because I am new to this and don't know how to prompt it properly. But at least it is interesting.
This sounds a lot like the classic "the way to get a good answer on the internet is to post a wrong answer first", but in reverse - the AI gives you a bad version which trolls you into digging in and giving the right answer :-)
That’s a totally fair take IMHO, and I’m very much conflicted on several ends on this topic—for example, would I want my juniors to use an agent? No; not even the mid levels, probably. As you say, it’s easy to form bad habits, and you need a good intuition for architecture and complexity, otherwise you end up with broken, unmaintainable messes. but if you have that, it’s like magic.
That is a naive assumption. Or rather multiple naive assumptions: Developers mostly don’t move over to AI development, but integrate it into their workflow. Many of them will stay intellectually curious and thus focus their attention elsewhere; I’m not convinced they will just suddenly all stagnate.
Also, training data isn’t just crawled text from the internet anymore, but also sourced from interactions of millions of developers with coding agents, manually provided sample sessions, deliberately generated code, and more—there is a massive amount of money and research involved here, so that’s another bet I wouldn’t be willing to make.
I think your image of LLMs is a bit outdated. Claude Code with well-configured agents will get entirely novel stuff done pretty well, and that’s only going to get better over time.
I have been waiting for this for a while now. There’s a window of opportunity coming for European startups soon, when more and more companies are looking for strategic alternatives to US software.
Mark my words, the way the Trump Administration is driving the US economy against the wall, this will happen sooner or larer
It always sounds so ridiculous to me when people working for Meta, Microsoft or Google talk about idealism, or solving good problems, or really any kind of values. The likes of you have very much sold your soul to the devil in exchange for a lot of money.
Any kind of idealism you may hold is nothing but a carefully crafted illusion to keep you from thinking too hard about what you are a part of, what are you are doing. If it hasn’t made click after big tech fell on their knees in front of Trump, there’s nothing left to say anymore.
So in a sense, Goedecke is right: Be a little cynical. Don’t bother with a veneer of the greater good or some other bullshit. Enjoy your paychecks while it lasts.
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