As someone who has had to deal with OAuth quite a bit at work, I like it for the most part, but it's just so dang big and complicated.
Almost everyone thinks of OAuth as the "three legged redirect" flow, where one site sends you to another, you say "Yes, I authorize" and it sends you back, and now that site can act as you on that other site.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg! That's called the "authorization code" grant, because implementation wise the one site gives a special one time authorization code to the other one, which it can then exchange server-to-server to get the actual sensitive access credential.
What about if the human isn't in the loop at that moment? Well you have the "client credentials" grant. Or what if it's limited input like a TV or something, well then you have the "device" grant.
And what if the client can't securely store a client secret, because it's a single page web app or a mobile application? Then it has to be a public client, and you can use PKCE or PAR for flow integrity.
What if you can't establish the clients up front? There's DCR, which is all important now with MCP. But then that either lets unauthenticated requests in to create resources in your data stores, or needs to be bootstrapped by some other form of authentication.
It's all just a sprawling behemoth of a framework, because it tries to do everything.
> It's all just a sprawling behemoth of a framework, because it tries to do everything.
I also interact with OAuth quite a bit at work. I also have dealt with SAML.
I'd pick OAuth over SAML any day of the week, and not just because OAuth (v2 at least) is 7 years younger.
It's also because OAuth, for all its sprawl, lets you pick and choose different pieces to focus on, and has evolved over time. The overall framework tries to meet everyone's needs, but accomplishes this via different specs/RFCs.
SAML, on the other hand, is an 800 page behemoth spec frozen in time. It tried to be everything to everyone using the tools available at the time (XML, for one). Even though the spec isn't evolving (and the WG is shut down) it's never going to go away--it's too embedded as a solution for so many existing systems.
I also don't know what could replace OAuth. I looked at GNAP but haven't seen anything else comparable to OAuth.
>It's all just a sprawling behemoth of a framework, because it tries to do everything.
it is, but at the same time, that's kind of great. it handles all the things. but you don't have to use them all. for me, the point of oauth is that there's this whole complicated mess of stuff that happens in the auth layer, but the end result is a bearer token and maybe a refresh token.
you can build that mess of auth yourself, or you can swap in any of a bunch of different third-party providers to do it for you, because they all just give you the same bearer and refresh token. then you can build your app in a way that doesn't care about auth, because it all gets handled inside that oauth box. are you currently serving a request that came from a client credentials grant, or an authorization code grant? was it a pkce client? it doesn't matter outside the client.
> It's all just a sprawling behemoth of a framework, because it tries to do everything.
Yeah, I mean it can be, but it doesn't have to be, depends entirely on what you need. And if you need those things, like machine-to-machine authentication, where you can't establish clients up front, you need to do something about it anyways, why not just go with something others might already know?
For their sake, I hope not. I don't think an outside-donation-financed project with this much ADD can survive in the long term.
It's frustrating to discuss. It is a wonderful case study in how not to make engineering management decisions, and yet, they've occurred over enough time, and the cause is appealing enough, that it's hard to talk about out loud in toto without sounding like a dismissive jerk.
> From what I can tell they're pretty laser focused on making a browser
I agree with you. I also agree that this decision is an example of that.
SerenityOS had an "everything from scratch in one giant mono-repo" rule. It was, explicitly a hobby project and one rooted in enjoyment and 'idealism from the get go. It was founded by a man looking for something productive to focus on instead of drugs. It was therapy. Hence the name.
Ladybird, as an independent project, was founded with the goal of being the only truly independent web browser (independent from corporate control generally and Google specifically).
They have been very focussed on that, have not had any sacred cows, and have shed A LOT of the home-grown infrastructure they inherited from being part of SerenityOS. Sometimes that saddens me a little but there is no denying that it has sped them up.
Their progress has been incredible. This comment is being written in Ladybird. I have managed GitHub projects in Ladybird. I have sent Gmail messages in Ladybird. It is not "ready" but it blows my mind how close it is.
I think Ladybid will be a "usable" browser before we enter 2027. That is just plain amazing.
Yeah, Serenityos was build everything from scratch for fun. Ladybird is build where an alternative implementation is going to add value. No need to get sidetracked reinventing SSL or ffmpeg.
What's actually happening? From the commentary here on HN I thought everyone was going to have to upload an ID or something. I use a Discord server to chat with some old high school friends, and wasn't wanting to upload my ID to them. But this update[0] from Discord says they're not requiring everyone to, and that "the vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today, without ever being asked to confirm their age." So I'm assuming I won't have to, after all. Do we know who will, when, or why?
They have a ML model based on shrug emoji that decides if you’re in the automatically approved bucket, the face verification bucket or the ID verification bucket. If face verification fails or you’re in the high risk bucket you’ll need to send them ID to access adult content, i.e. any channels manually set to nsfw, anything their classifier deems nsfw and anything in servers deemed nsfw. Discord would like to imply that most users are in the automatically verified bucket and only like porn is flagged nsfw, but it’s entirely in their control to tighten these screws when they reckon that the controversy is over (and they’ve already been trialling more mandatory ID verification on UK users, before starting the global rollout)
My guess would be that for most people they already have a pretty good idea if you are an adult.
Like my account was created years and years ago not long after it was released so unless I was under 8 when I did so the odds are pretty good I am at least 18.
But to further my guess of why they are not bugging you is because they are not YET bugging you. By that I mean then want to make it seem like they only want to "save the children". That, in a lot of cases they basically already know you must be over 18. But in my opinion that is only to lessen the blow and not annoy everyone at once. Many escape ID requirements and continue to use the app and if all goes well not enough people push back or quit and a high enough number of people continue to use the app that it makes other people either use the user hostile app or not easily connect and communicate to a large community.
But also in my opinion once people calm down and move on they will continue to push more demand for user ID. It will be a slow push but knowing who you are is too valuable. There will be excuses as to why they need it and eventually there will be a reason why you a user of over a decade will also need to prove you are who you are.
One positive note I am actually old man wrinkly balls. I have been there for the rise and fall of many sites. Maybe it will happen for discord as well only time will tell. Cheers
Age verification is required for age limited servers and channels. The vast majority are not age limited and will remain available without verification. As has happened in the past, more of the remaining channels will turn off age limiting as it becomes more invasive, in favor of moderation and tweaked community standards (no more porn in #shitpost). I'd expect the remaining bits will leave, with most of the members not wanting it to be linked to their real id.
Australia recently locked under 16s out of social media and it seems like the social media companies used heuristics to determine if accounts were owned by under 16s... so I assume Discord will do something similar.
I'm in Australia and have not been prompted to verify my identity for any service (I'm assuming that one of the heuristics is average age of "friends" but I have no idea).
This new ID policy is to get into servers tagged NSFW, like OF creator communities. The new policy says by default, you can't get into those servers without uploading IDs.
So, for the vast majority of servers, like your high school friends, local Pokemon Go servers, work alumni, etc, they'll still work fine without an ID upload.
I don't think any of us are going to be able to get enough of a sample size to know if their age estimation tool is working well or not. You can know the age of your real life friends, but beyond that it's just going to be self report.
No, you're the one anthropomorphizing here. What's shocking isn't that it "knows" something or not, but that it gets the answer wrong often. There are plenty of questions it will get right nearly every time.
I guess I mean that you're projecting anthropomorphization. When I see people sharing examples that the model answered wrong, I'm not interpreting that they think it "didn't know" the answer. Rather, they're reproducing the error. Most simple questions the models will get right nearly every time, so showing a failure is useful data.
I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read.
So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an experiment on that front. It basically is a little keylogger that records your composition of the comment, so someone can replay it and see that it was written by a human (or a very sophisticated agent!). I've found it to be a little unsettling, though, having your rewrites and false starts available for all to see, so I'm not sure if I like it.
My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.
> I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.
Wrote about this before [0] but my 2c: you shouldn't pause and you should keep using them because fuck these companies and their AI tools. We should not give them the power to dictate how we write.
Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism?
I think it's brave to keep using em dashes, but I don't think it's smart, because we human writers who like using them (myself very much included) will never have the mindshare to displace the culturally dominant meaning. At least, not until the dominant forces in AI decide of their own accord that they don't want their LLMs emitting so many of them.
I think it's safe to assume they meant it within their specific cultural context. They the symbol has different connotations in other cultures doesn't really change the point being made.
My point is just: if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’ depends on choosing an audience that conveniently erases everyone who uses it differently, that’s not describing intrinsic meaning, that’s describing the author’s cultural bubble and bias.
And on em dashes—most people outside tech circles see no “AI fingerprint,” and designers like myself have loved them since early Mac DTP, so the suspicion feels hilariously retroactive and very knee-jerk. So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot?
> So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot?
Then they might not read it at all. I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent.
I'm also not sure there is an "AI bubble." Everyone I know is using it in every industry. Museum education, municipal health services, vehicle engineering, publishing, logistics, I'm seeing it everywhere.
As mentioned elsewhere I've seen non-tech people refer to them as "AI dashes."
> if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’
There was no suggestion of such a test. No symbol has an intrinsic meaning. The point GP was about considering how your output will be received.
That point was very obviously made within a specific cultural context, at the very least limited to the world of the Latin alphabet. I'm sure there are other LLM signifiers outside of that bubble.
> I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent.
And how is this a problem someone else has to address? Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then? I have 10 years of writing on my site, if someone in 2026 sees my use of em dashes and suddenly starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.
Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing. I'm personally not gonna do it. Because again, now it's em dashes, tomorrow it could be a set of words, or a way to structure text. I say fuck that.
> And how is this a problem someone else has to address?
Where has anyone made the claim that it is?
> Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then?
No, but a good writer will generally consider if their text is needlessly verbose and try to make it palatable to their audience.
> starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.
If you want to reach them with your writing then it might become a problem. Obviously the focus on em dashes alone isn't enough but it's undoubtedly one of the flags.
> Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing.
It's bending rather to what readers are feeling. It's not following the top down orders of a corporation, it's being aware of how technology shapes readers' expectations and adapting your writing to that.
I'm not confident that the average person is aware of an em dash nor that it is widely associated with AI; I think the current culturally dominant meaning is just a fat hyphen (which most people just call a dash anyway).
My wife was working from home recently and I overheard a meeting she was having. It's a very non technical field. She and her team were working on a presentation and her boss said "let's use one of those little AI dashes here."
> Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism?
I'm happy to change my position when some 13 million people are killed by lunatics that used the em dash as the symbol of their ideology. Until then, I'll keep using it everywhere it's appropriate.
Also, if we don't have the guts to resist even when the stakes are this low and the consequences for our resistance are basically non existent, then society is doomed. We might as well roll on our side and die.
> At least, not until the dominant forces in AI decide of their own accord that they don't want their LLMs emitting so many of them.
It's not a power I'm willing to give them. What if tomorrow they tweak something and those tool start to use a specific word more often? Or a different punctuation sign? What do we do then? Do we constantly adapt, playing whack-a-mole? What if AI starts asking a lot more questions in their writing? Do we stop asking them as a result?
You feel free to adapt and bend. I'm personally not going to do it and if someone starts thinking that I'm using AI to write my thoughts and as a result that's on them.
For what it's worth, whatever LLMs do extensively, they do because it's a convention in well-established writing styles.
LLMs have a bias towards expertise and confidence due to the proportion of books in their training set. They also lean towards an academic writing style for the same reason.
All this to say, if LLMs write like you were already writing, it means you have very good foundations. It's fine to avoid them out of fear, but you have this Internet stranger's permission to use your em dash pause to think "Oh yeah, I'm the reference for writing style."
> For what it's worth, whatever LLMs do extensively, they do because it's a convention in well-established writing styles.
I think that's only part of the story. I think that while it's true what LLMs do is somehow represented in their corpus of training data, they also lack any understanding of how to adapt to the context, how to find a suitable "voice", and how not to overdo it, unless you explicitly prompt them otherwise, which is too much of a burden. Their default voice sucks, basically.
So let's say they learned to speak in Redditese. They don't know when not to speak in that voice. They always seem to be trying to make persuasive arguments, follow patterns of "It's not X. It's Y. And you know it (mic drop)." But real humans don't speak like this all the damn time. If you speak like this to your mom or to your closest friends, you're basically an idiot.
It's not that you cannot speak like this. It's that you cannot do it all the time. And that's the real problem with LLMs.
Mostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes.
AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it.
My personal situation is fine though. AI writing usually has better sentence structure, so it's pretty easy (to me at least) to distinguish my own writing from AI because I have run-on sentences and too many commas. Nobody will ever confuse me with a lazy AI user, I'm just plain bad at writing.
There's your trouble. The real problem is that most internet users are setting their baseline for "standard issue human writing" at exactly the level they themselves write. The problem is that more and more people do not draw a line between casual/professional writing, and as such balk at very normal professional writing as potentially AI-driven.
Blame OS developers for making it easy—SO easy!—to add all manner of special characters while typing if you wish, but the use of those characters, once they were within easy reach, grew well before AI writing became a widespread thing. If it hadn't, would AI be using it so much now?
As someone who frequently posts online- with em dashes- I wonder if I am part of the problem with training llms to use them so much- and am going to get punished in the future for doing so.
I also tend to way overuse parenthesis (because I tend to wander in the middle of sentences) but they haven't shown up much in llms so /shrug.
Or you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win.
> Or you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win.
What delusion? The false positive rate just on HN alone is so low it's not even a rounding error.
I don’t think I’m judging shallowly- there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is if you use a typesetting program like LaTeX, or Word changes an en-dash with auto formatting, or the user consciously interrupts their writing flow to insert the character with a special keystroke combination or by pasting it in. The proportion of people who do any of those things in writing for the web is quite small. The number of clearly AI written posts with em-dashes is quite large. So large, that I immediately suspect AI writing when I see an em-dash and I rarely see countering evidence that suggests the author is human but meticulous about how they write.
> there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is (…)
Then you proceed to list multiple ways to do it, but neglected to mention that by default on Apple operating systems they are inserted automatically when typing “--“. It’s something you have to explicitly turn off of you don’t want it. On Apple mobile operating systems you can also long press the hyphen to get the option. Em-dashes are trivial to type.
Both of the examples you gave both fall under "a special keystroke combination," which I did list. Typing "--" is two keystrokes compared to one for an en-dash.
The iOS example isn't just "long press the hyphen" it's "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen, and slide your finger over the em-dash" compared to "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen" for the en-dash.
If you're going to argue at least be genuine. I didn't say it was hard to type an em-dash, I showed that every way to get an em-dash into your writing takes an extra step. Taking an extra step compared to other characters means it isn't trivial.
For someone writing publication quality work, em-dashes appear and if I see an em-dash in a book I don't assume AI writing. But for comments on the internet or a blog posts that aren't meticulous everywhere else, an en-dash is a pretty good signal that the work is AI generated. When people are writing, needing an extra step to insert an em-dash is disruptive to most people's train of thought.
Neither did I say you said that. I only said they are trivial to type. Which they are. I do it all the time, and it doesn’t interrupt my train of thought any more than a comma. I also do the keyboard shortcuts for things like “smart quotes” and apostrophes (’). For some of those I even have my own special snippets in Alfred, like typing "" produces “” with the caret in between. I can’t even tell you what the exact shortcuts for those are without looking at my fingers, because they are so ingrained in my muscle memory. I know I’m far from alone in that.
> But for comments on the internet or a blog posts that aren't meticulous everywhere else, an en-dash is a pretty good signal that the work is AI generated.
Exactly this! I love(d) using em dashes.
Now they’ve become ehm dashes, experiencing exactly that pause — that moment of hesitation — that you describe
AI never uses em dashes in a pair like this, whereas most people who like em dashes do. Anyone who calls paired em dash writing AI is only revealing themselves to be a duffer.
In my limited text generation experience, LLMs use em-dashes precisely like that, only without spaces on the sides and always in pairs in a single sentence. Here some examples from my Gemini history:
"The colors we see—like blue, green, and hazel—are the result of Tyndall scattering."
"Several interlocking cognitive biases create a "safety net" around the familiar, making the unknown—even if objectively better—feel like a threat."
"A retrograde satellite will pass over its launch region twice every 24 hours—once on a "northbound" track and once on a "southbound" track—but because of the way Earth rotates, it won't pass over the exact same spot on every orbit."
"Central, leverages streaming telemetry to provide granular, real-time performance data—including metrics (e.g., CPU utilization, throughput, latency), logs, and traces—from its virtualized core and network edge devices."
"When these conditions are met—indicating a potential degradation in service quality (e.g., increased modem registration failures, high latency on a specific Remote PHY)—Grafana automatically triggers notifications through configured contact points (e.g., Slack, PagerDuty)."
After collecting these samples I've noticed that they are especially probably in questions like explain something or write descriptive text. In the short queries there is not much text in total to trigger this effect.
Yes, the LLMs have made great progress in that regard. It wasn't too long ago that the majority of dashes seen in LLM material could have been commas, periods, or nothing at all with no loss of tone or meaning, and almost none were used to offset parenthetical phrases. It was nearly exclusively an overdramatic flourish. And now look at them. They're growing up. Just makes you want to squeeze them until they pop.
We're in the brief window of time when AI's writing style is the weirdness. It's an artifact of the production process, like JPG blur, MP3 distortion, autotune's rigidity. And it didn't take long for those things to become normalized, in fact for them to become artifacts that people proudly adopted and embraced. DJs release tracks built from MP3s samples instead of waves. Autotune is famously a 'sound' that was once something to be subtly added and never confessed to, but which now genres and artists lean into rather than away from.
Long story short: I think emoji in headings and lists, em dashes, and the vile TED Talk paragraph structure of "long sentence with lots of words asking a question or introducing a possibility. followed by. short sentences. rebutting. or affirming." are here to stay. My money is that it gets normalized and embraced as "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere."
> "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere."
These assumptions might also change though. Up until now any writing you saw "everywhere" was probably written by someone who studied and loved written communication and was brining their artisanal care to the table. That's no longer the case.
It's called slop for a reason. When I come across a GitHub README written by AI I don't feel put off just because the author used AI to write it, I feel frustrated because it's genuinely poorly communicating with me. Fill of extraneous details, artifacts from the conversation, and stuff I already know ("uses GitHub to share the source democratically!").
Not to mention "seriously", "really", "truly", "very", "verily", etc. There's a long history of using words related to truth as intensifiers in English.
I've noticed that LLMs generated text often has spaces around em dashes, which I found odd. They don't always do that, but they do it often enough that it stood out to me since that isn't what you'd normally see.
> Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is.
That's the normal way of using them in British English. Though they also tend to be the (slightly shorter) en-dashes too.
I feel that style is often pretty common on the "old" internet - possibly related to how they can be so easily be replaced by a hyphen back when ascii was a likely limitation.
> Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is.
It's a matter of style preference. I support spaces around em-dashes — particularly for online writing, since em-dashes without spaces make selecting and copying text with precision an unnecessary frustration.
By the way,what other punctuation mark receives no space on at least one side?Wouldn't it look odd,make sentences harder to read,and make ideas more difficult to grok?I certainly think so.Don't you? /s
I don't think someone who doesn't want AI slop filtering out someone who gets mad at that to the point of calling them haters is really a false positive.
This is the modern day "I can tell that's photoshopped because I've seen some 'shops in my day." The sooner we stop glorifying the people who think they're magical LLM detectors, the better, frankly.
It doesn't have to be a perfect filter to be a good heuristic. And unless you have a better suggestion how people can avoid slop then it'll keep being used.
You’re absolutely right. I hate AI writing — it’s not that I hate AI, it’s that it makes everything it says sound a specific combination of smug and authoritative — No matter the content. Once you realize it’s not saying anything, that’s the real aha moment.
Well, LLMs can be either side of that. They can also be used to turn something verbose into a series of bullet points.
I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew.
> I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew.
I like the idea that various communications media have implicit social contracts that can be broken. In my opinion, power point presentations break an implicit social contract that is held in handwritten talks: if it's worth you displaying a piece of information, so that I the listener feel the need to take it in or even copy it down, it has to be worth your time to actually physically write it on the board. With power point talks this is not honored, and the average power point talk is much, much worse than the average chalk talk. I bet there are lots of other examples.
Well the thing with powerpoint presentations is that the listener doesn't have to write them down and can instead use the copy you share with them if they need a future reference.
And it should still be worth for them to listen if you don't suck at presenting and don't just read the text from the slides.
In 2020 at the start of covid, I did an experiment I called Project 35 where, for 35 days straight before my 35th birthday, I wrote 3 times per day, for 10 minutes each, I livestreamed it and whatever I wrote I would put directly into a book with no edits. While I didn't invite many people to join the calls (maybe fear, maybe just not wanting to coordinate it all), I found the process to be more raw, more human, and less perfect than 10x edited writing. It also helped me get better at typing in the moment and not rewriting everything, especially for social media, HN, and other places.
Anyway, it's at https://www.jimkleiber.com/p35/ if you wanna check it out, all sessions posted as blog posts, I think there's a link to the ebook (pay-what-you-want) and there may be audio (I recorded myself reading the writing right after each session).
LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (Cantrill)
≈
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. (Brandolini)
Years ago I wrote something similar to test a biometric security piece that used keystroke timings (dwell and stroke) to determine if the person typing the password is the same person who owns the account. Short version of a long story is that it would be trivial to get data for AI to reproduce human typing. Because I did it years ago using something only slightly more sophisticated than urandom.
Based on the programs I was nudged to as a child, it was a surprise to no one but me that I scored higher verbal on the SATs than I did math, which I would have told you was my favorite subject. Despite the fact that French was my easiest subject. I can still picture the look on my french teacher’s face if I’d have mentioned this in front of him.
There are a lot of people like me in software. I’m tempted to say we are “shouted down”, but honestly it’s hard to be shouted down when you can talk circles around some people. But we are definitely in a minority. There are actually a lot of parallels between creative writing and software and a few things that are more than parallel. Like refactoring.
If you’re actually present when writing docs instead of monologuing in your head about how you hate doing “this shit”, then there’s a lot of rubber ducking that can be done while writing documentation. And while I can’t say that “let the AI do it” will wipe out 100% of this value, because the AI will document what you wrote instead of what you meant to write, I do think you will lose at least 80% of that value by skipping out on these steps.
I don't like AI writing because it's bad writing. It's convoluted and inefficient and doesn't get to the point. If someone writes something that feels like AI, it doesn't matter if it was or not because it's still bad writing. I'm not talking about having a cliche here and there, but rather when the text is just incredibly inefficient.
They want all this artisnal hand written prose under the candle light with the moon in the background. And you are a horrible person for using AI, blablabla.
But ask for feedback? And you get Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. Aka ghosted. But boy, do they tell a good story. Just ain't fucking true.
Counter: companies deserve the same amount of time invested in their application as they spend on your response.
If a person is working 40 hours a week to contribute to society, then they should be able to afford housing from that society. If a person on minimum wage needs to have a roommate to get by, then that means that their 40 hours a week is not enough to afford their own shelter. Without that roommate, the person goes without a home despite having done their time for society. This is not reasonable.
If it is reasonable for a young person to have flatmates, then that should be because they are a student or an artist and are working only part-time while devoting the rest of their time to their studies or their art.
But a person working full-time? Who may be a single mother or father with a child to support? They should be able to afford a place to live, without roommates.
I would only add that young people or anyone should be able to afford to live alone as you say OR opt to live with roommates to share expenses and save and build wealth. It shouldn't be necessary for anyone working 40 hours a week to pool their resources with other people in similar situations simply to survive.
A minimum wage should not necessarily afford you a median home, that's why it's called a minimum. But for a functional developed nation I argue it should afford you a private room or a very small apartment. Ideally the cost between the two wouldn't be that different, but due to decades of building restrictions the latter does not really exist. This isn't true in Japan for example, where you can find arbitrarily small apartments at correspondingly low prices.
A living wage is for living indefinitely, not just surviving. That should afford more comforts like a reasonable amount of space, a car if needed, and saving for retirement or emergencies.
A living wage shouldn't be based upon what wages a student could be comfortably living on for a couple years before they get their $500k/yr new grad quant job. It should be based upon what people could live on comfortably indefinitely.
It's not "student wage". It's not "struggling young person" wage. It's "living" wage. It's for living - at any age.
Does this then imply some jobs are not intended to supply a living wage?
Eg does that quants internship get a lower pay because they are expected to graduate beyond it? If so, how do we define what jobs are stepping stones and which are long-term careers?
I think all full time jobs should at a minimum pay a true living wage where one can live comfortably, save for emergencies, etc. If the job cannot pay that then it shouldn't exist.
There are many ways to accomplish this beyond simply raising wages. Better government programs, lower the cost of housing/medical/transportation/food/etc. (these are surprisingly simple but many vested interests don't want this to happen), better retirement programs, etc. etc. etc. You see more of this in more socially democratic countries.
In that case none of the unprofitable tech companies should exist. It’s really easy for people in the tech industry who live off of the tits of VC funding say that mom and pop convenience store who can’t depend on the same largess shouldn’t exist.
I’m not against that idea but there are some knock-on effects we should be careful of. For example, it will make it hard for younger people to get a job. If I have to pay a teenager the same as someone with a decade or more of work experience, that teenager probably won’t get a job.
With a lot of these discussions, we need to be careful about the seductively simple solutions.
Because sometimes people have other goals or are just not an industrious personality.
I remember a radio interview with a fast food worker who’s response was basically “I like my job and don’t want to do something else, but I just want it to be a higher wage”
Not sure what your point is. Are you saying people don’t act in a multi-objective way? Do you think people join the Marines because it’s the easiest way to make a buck? Or is it possible people aren’t just simple homo-economicus types trying to maximize their income with the lowest effort?
The issue of "which jobs should exist" should be left to the market only. If typical low-end jobs throughout the country pay wages that do not guarantee a minimum living income, the government should simply make up the difference for everyone in a fair way (subject to clawback rates as earned income increases, in order to keep the overall arrangement viable).
(Lowering the cost of essential goods and services is also something that can be done by leveraging the open market. It doesn't take yet another wasteful government program, which is the typical approach in socialist and social-democrat countries.)
Is it reasonable for two people who are dating to have to keep their shared apartment when they break up? What should happen if a roommate becomes flaky or moves out?
These are all real situations that make me think that pinning "living wage" to a level where you have to have roommates is not a good goal. You're basically asking people to survive by accepting unstable living conditions and potentially taking strangers into their homes, which isn't exactly "having your needs met."
Seriously. Lots of people have roommates to save money. But they often meet those people socially, and sometimes those people flake on rent or just straight up dip out on the lease. And living with strangers an even tougher ask.
When did a 450 sqft studio apt become a luxury? Why should it? That's a tiny amount of space. People should be able to afford that.
Its reasonable, but as we've advanced humanity in so many other fields (medical, technical, agricultural) why shouldn't the base standard of living also be increasing.
I agree with the sentiment, but the premise of capitalism is that those advances also become cheaper due to market efficiencies. In other words, people should be able to have a higher quality of life for relatively lower cost. If/where that actually occurs is a whole different discussion.
The base standard of living has increased throughout pretty much all of humanity over the past 50 years, and through huge parts of humanity over even 20 years.
Theres also lots more people, and as more people consume more resources it does not follow that better technology in some field will translate to increased every aspect of life.
Historically it's reasonable for anybody to have roommates. It's a modern scenario where having your own place is supposed to be the standard.
Historically housing was much smaller. And people lived with their families for a lot longer commonly. A lot less was also spent on domestic appliances (not just washer & dryers) and at-home entertainment (a lot less was spent on entertainment in general).
Any adult with a full-time job should be able to afford a studio or small apartment. Probably making concessions on the location depending on where they want to live. It's not a matter of being young or not
In the US, this is trivial to do. Theres plenty of states where unskilled entry lever wages easily allows this life, for most of the locations, with the exception of extremely high cost city centers.
Pick IL for example. Min wage $15, so $30k a year income fulltime. Most every adult that’s worked even a little should be able to earn decently more than min, which is for completely unskilled, new workers. Median il wage is 66k.
Even at $30k, the rough 30% rule on housing is $750/mo. At 66k it’s over $1500/mo.
Dig through smaller cities, and you’ll find apartments to rent in either end of this range. This works in any state.
Part of the issue is those smaller cities don’t offer a large supply of job opportunities. So people are often not able to pick and choose their location.
This is an underappreciated argument for basic income/UBI: you need a lot less of it since its very existence enables recipients to move to lower cost of living locations.
(Which in turn opens up opportunities for others to move in to the higher-cost places and boost their own productivity.)
Plenty of cities outside the top 100 have massive amounts of jobs. And the person I replied to specifically stated willing to vary location as an option.
Fair enough, but I think we’re talking different scale. Top 100 cities is still a population of >200k. I was thinking of the small dying rust-belt type of <10k or so
I think the "software factory" terminology is very interesting, and I would imagine quite intentional.
It calls to mind the early days of the industrial revolution, when I believe the idea was that mass produced items were not better quality, just dramatically cheaper. So you still had the artisans that the rich people paid for but now poorer people had access to something they couldn't before.
Then, as technology progressed, factories started producing things that humans are incapable of. And part of this is because those factories were built on output of earlier factories.
It makes me wonder if this is where we're headed. Right now the code quality of agents isn't better than hand written code, and so arguably the products aren't either. But will there come a time when it surpasses what we can do? You can't handcraft a microchip, for example. But I guess the takeaway is maybe there's a time for both agentic lower quality but cheaper output and human software engineer higher quality output, at least for a time.
Which is exactly why agentic coding tools are effectively running at a loss right now. We are training that next generation of factories. We're paying in human cognition.
"Software factory" is a pretty conventional term used for a CI/CD pipeline with automation including DevSecOps, containerization, and agile management.
Almost everyone thinks of OAuth as the "three legged redirect" flow, where one site sends you to another, you say "Yes, I authorize" and it sends you back, and now that site can act as you on that other site.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg! That's called the "authorization code" grant, because implementation wise the one site gives a special one time authorization code to the other one, which it can then exchange server-to-server to get the actual sensitive access credential.
What about if the human isn't in the loop at that moment? Well you have the "client credentials" grant. Or what if it's limited input like a TV or something, well then you have the "device" grant.
And what if the client can't securely store a client secret, because it's a single page web app or a mobile application? Then it has to be a public client, and you can use PKCE or PAR for flow integrity.
What if you can't establish the clients up front? There's DCR, which is all important now with MCP. But then that either lets unauthenticated requests in to create resources in your data stores, or needs to be bootstrapped by some other form of authentication.
It's all just a sprawling behemoth of a framework, because it tries to do everything.
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