Same in Australia and only recently (that is, in the last year) has there been any restrictions on showing gambling ads during live sports events.
It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.
As for sportspeople throwing games, well that’s been happening for as long as betting has been around as well, see countless examples from football (soccer) and cricket.
AFAIK Australia is most gambling addicted western country, loosing the most money per capita at the pokies.
>It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.
I remember how Henry Ford was giving his employee great benefits to attract the best workers so the Dodge brothers bought Ford shares to become shareholders, then sued Henry Ford and won because he wasn't doing what's good for the shareholders.
Similarly, I feel like if you'd try to regulate these anti humane businesses and practices you'd get sued because you're doing something that hurts shareholders.
It has been going on in the US for years - even when it was illegal, there was still illegal gambling and more then one person has been caught throwing games. Sports beet was always legal in Law Vegas though (at least from what I can tell), but most states banned it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose#Betting_scandal,_per...
Yep. Gambling is Australia's version of America's gun problem. We've recently banned kids from social media, yet we're apparently unable to ban gambling ads from kids content. Every time the (various levels of) government here talk about even the tiniest new gambling related regulation, somehow - definitely totally without any brown paper bags whatsoever going into any back pockets - it doesn't seem to actually happen. Magic!
Maybe Something to do with Family Purchase Sharing. I didn’t realize when I bought an audio book it would appear in my dad’s library. Kind of embarrassing. Apple’s help pages make it sound very opt in but I think there are bugs where libraries are merged by default. Some say on a quiet night you can still hear Bono singing “sexy boots”…
> Finally, I’d like to note that this sort of dev work goes beyond hubris. It’s dangerous. The more we assume we know without verifying, the greater the risk. In this case, the dev is risking someone else’s livelihood.
I think this is a bit of an overstatement. The dev states it’s her brother’s business, and one can assume he’s asked her to help him out.
Getting the service to be 100% perfect is of course a near impossible challenge, but that’s most likely not the business owner’s concern — they simply want a way to avoid totally losing business. If the service can convert even 10% of customers with a rough quote and timeline it’s most likely useful.
High end shops live off reputation alone. Usually they’re started by a very skilled mechanic who does racing or some other specialty automotive hobby.
The exit plan for these guys is usually to sell the shop. Most buyers are usually skilled white collar workers looking for a new hobby. The shop folds after that because they no longer have the same connections to the specialty community.
You can get business outside of the specialty auto scene. In fact, it’s required since that’s what actually makes money. Google reviews and word of mouth are king here.
So do you remove the owner from the customer experience? I wouldn’t. But if you are going to do that, then, understanding the risk is important.
There are a few emotional trigger points that LLMs seem to cause in programmers and this is a common one -- the need for deep, first-principles understanding that LLMs make obsolete.
One thing that gets me in a lot of pieces like this is they kind of assume people have no agency, that now that these tools exist we won't be able to help ourselves but use them despite our better judgement.
The broader topic which I don't see discussed so much are values. If you value deep understanding, well you should continue programming and learning in such a way. In some cases you may just want to use a language model to spin up a quick tool or PoC. And there is an entire grey area in between. It's a value judgement to decide what you use LLMs for, as much as what you don't.
> we won't be able to help ourselves but use them despite our better judgement.
Who is we, exactly. Programmers are very rarely the people that are making money in businesses that develop software. In fact they typically represent a massive expense. So in a huge portion of the cases 'we the programmer' will be told what to do in the sense they have to use LLMs to increase their productivity.
When looking at what we tell LLMs to do, you realize there are a lot of cases were humans have less agency than they think.
> There are a few emotional trigger points that LLMs seem to cause in programmers and this is a common one -- the need for deep, first-principles understanding that LLMs make obsolete.
Is it also an "emotional trigger point" that causes people to treat their hunches as facts?
> deep, first-principles understanding that LLMs make obsolete.
I don’t think that’s the case. I agree with the rest of what you wrote. But it’s not a value out of thin air. You need understanding, unless all you ever do is “spin up a quick tool or PoC”. And even then it depends on what you want to quickly use the tool for, or what concept you want to prove.
Idk, as someone who has done LLM driven development of fairly complex things (type systems, memory allocation gymnastics etc) I don't think the need to understand what's going on from first principles has really gone away. If I just want some isolated thing to work I can vibe code with no understanding, but there's no way to get coherence between behaviour, performance characteristics, purity etc without fully understanding the problem space. The LLM just saves (a shitload) of time on grunt work.
Of course if you're building some crud app it's all already tread ground, and you probably can just throw a prompt at an LLM and get something acceptable out.
>Of course if you're building some crud app it's all already tread ground, and you probably can just throw a prompt at an LLM and get something acceptable out.
This is what I think most people who haven't had boring CRUD jobs just don't get - the impact of having some deep technical knowledge goes to waste if all you're struggling with is dumb stuff like bad database design and basic security vulnerabilities everywhere. This was all done by people who are no longer there and were just in it for the paycheck. But also no one who is good is doing these jobs because the pay is too low compared to what they can get.
I'm sure all of this is true if you are teaching at MIT or are working anywhere near people who have gone there though.
Feelings aside[1], a large part of it is about having management above you. Take that plus the ever-present online nagging about productivity. If the latter is true then, well, it’s not like there is a choice.
For people who’s main computing devices are phones, this isn’t hard to believe at all.
Interacting outside of the tech bubble is eye opening. Conversely, the hair stylist might have mentioned the brand of a super popular scissor supplier/other equipment you’d have never heard of.
It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.
As for sportspeople throwing games, well that’s been happening for as long as betting has been around as well, see countless examples from football (soccer) and cricket.
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