> In my opinion information wants to be free.

But I still need to pay rent.

Well like a plumber then you should string together one paid job after another. Not do a job once and collect forever.

Rent is a political problem.

Perhaps invest in the courage to confront some droopy faced Boomers in Congress.

The thing is, someone will collect rent from IP anyways. LLMs shift rent collecting from decentralized individuals to a handful of big tech companies.

> someone will collect rent from IP anyways

We should work on fixing that, then.

I agree with your point about big tech companies salivating at opportunities to collect rent. IP is part of the problem.

Yeah they will. Because Muricans are too busy belaboring the obvious on social media rather than tackling the obvious political problems.

I also find the 1Password browser (Safari) extension to pitifully poor. But there's a neat workaround: set up a hotkey for 'Show Quick Access'. I use Ctrl+Opt+\.

This pops up 1Password's overlay but it is still URL-aware. I find it works almost universally. It'll show you what it's going to fill: just hit Return and it'll be done.

It doesn't even care what browser you're in. Works across the lot. Of course it isn't fully integrated so Passkeys won't work.

I’d have pushed the red emergency button.

It really helps where the code I'm writing fits the broad description of boilerplate.

Need to integrate Stripe with the Clerk API in my Astro project? Claude's all over that. 300% faster. I think of it like, if there was a package that did exactly what I wanted, I'd use that package. There just happens not to be; but Claude excels at package-like code.

But as soon as I need to write any unique code – the code that makes my app my app – I find it's perhaps a touch faster in the moment, but the long-term result isn't faster.

Because now I don't understand my code, right? How could I. I didn't write it. So as soon as something goes wrong, or I want to add a feature, either I exacerbate this problem by getting Claude to do it, or I have to finally put in the work that I should have put in the first time.

Or I have to spend about the same amount of time creating a CLAUDE.md that I would have if I'd just figured out the code myself. Except now the thing I learned is how to tell a machine how to do something that I actually enjoy doing myself. So I never learn; on the contrary, I feel dumber. Which seems a bit weird.

And if I choose the lazy option here and keep deferring my knowledge to Claude, now I'm charging customers for a thing that I 'vibe coded'. And frankly if you're doing that I don't know how you sleep at night.

This. LLMs are good at stuff that is very general (is often in the dataset). What i gain most from LLM is when i use it to teach me - like extended documentation.

But to make unique solutions you will get pretty random results and worse you are not building understanding and domain knowledge of your program.

Claude Code sounds cool until it makes 3 changes at once 2 of which you are unsure if they are required or if they wont't break something else. I like it for scripts, data transformations and self contained small programs where i can easily verify correctness.

> What i gain most from LLM is when i use it to teach me - like extended documentation.

This, yes. What I do now is use Claude but expressly tell it do not edit my code, just show me, I want to learn. I'm not a very experienced dev so often it'll show me a pattern that I'm unfamiliar with.

I'll use that new knowledge, but then go and type out the code myself. This is slower, in the moment. But I am convinced that the long-term results are better (for me).

It is especially helpful when new in some framework where you aim to follow best practices so others can follow and you don't end up reinventing.

I don't have one, but nor do I have a car. So the secret is: walk everywhere. Walk walk walk.

That keeps me 'fit'. I'm 49 and perfectly healthy, good weight, 120/80 bp.

I know I need to do more strength training but I'm not in a place (spatially) where I can do that.

Diet is of course a huge factor, but you didn't ask about that so while I'll allude to the can of worms, I shan't open it.

The problem isn't the generation, it's the taste of the generators.

An earnest young lady with a guitar can already sing a light jazz version of 'Highway to Hell' or whatever. Just go to your local cafe to hear it. The objective quality is terrific.

In the past, this wouldn't have been made because the end result is subjectively banal. But now people with no taste can churn it out by the thousands of hours for free.

> normalising people uploading identification documents and hence lead to people becoming victims of scams

We've long lost this war.

I'm in Italy, staying at my 3rd Airbnb. I was surprised when the first asked me, casually, to drop a photograph of my passport in the chat. I checked with Claude: yep, that's the law.

(I'll remind you that Italy is in the EU.)

On checking into this place last week, the guy just took a photo of our passports on his phone. At this point I'm too weak to argue. And what's the point? That is no longer private data and if I pretend that it is, I'm the fool.

I'm pretty sure in most places in the world if you are travelling from abroad you are asked to share your passport, and have been for a very very very very long time.

The difference between sending it over a chat and handing it over to a clerk (who then photocopies it or types in the data into the computer) feels almost academic. Though at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.

> The difference between sending it over a chat and handing it over to a clerk (who then photocopies it [...]

The difference is that the paper copy is local and only accessible to the hotel (and any government employee that might come knocking).

The digital version is accessible to anyone who has access to the system, which as we know well on HN includes bureaucrats (or police) with a vendetta against you and any hacker that can manage to breach the feeble defenses of the computer storing the data. That computer isn't locked down because the information is not valuable to the person who holds it; they're paid to satisfy a record-keeping law, not maintain system security.

> at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.

Agreed, except now uploading a scan is the easiest way to file the data.

Good points.

I do agree that "not without a warrant" is a pretty load-bearing thing and it _should_ be tedious to get information. When a lot of info is just so easy to churn through that can activate new forms of abuse, even if from an information-theoretical point of view the information was always there.

And it's not even just about public officials. All those stories of people at Google reading their exes emails or whatever (maybe it was FB? Still) sticks to me.

Yeah but previous attack vector:

- Fraudster has to bribe hotel staff, or get on staff and then work there and steal documents. Tricky.

New attack vector:

- Fraudster rents out Airbnb. Trivial.

Well, even there, you're doing a transaction worth hundreds to thousands of dollars probably.

This pretty much lowers the bar to any random website on the internet can ask for ID to do something as trivial as look at a photo.

In a world where social engineering is the last unsolvable security vector, this is significant even if it is just a matter of degree.

Yes. My partner got one in Morioka about 6 weeks ago.

Edit: very, very quickly after the quake, which we felt, I might add. I got a notification via the 'Safety tips' app long after. I think I was on Airplane mode at the time.

How hard could it be — genuine question — for, say, Apple (Nikon, Sony,…) to embed a QR code (optionally) into an image.

QR leads you to a page, you upload image to page, hashes are compared, image-from-sensor confirmed.

Surely at this point we need provable ‘photography’ for the mass market.

What system would you create that prevents a camera from being pointed at a screen? Because if you can't block the analog hole, any verification scheme is trivial to bypass.

None but it makes it more difficult. People could “photoshop” before digital but most didn’t. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, etc.

Perhaps, but in this case I'd worry that the workaround is so easy that the only result is people trust the system more and are easier to trick while not actually raising the difficulty.

you still need to check the bridge.

I could take a real image of the collapsed bridge, modify it somehow with AI, post it, you then say "hey, its not real, look, QR doesnt match, the bridge is safe"

You’re seeing commercials?

There’s your problem.

OTOH product placement is your "friend".