I already do this using git branched. Whenever I have features that depends on one another I create a feature branch and then stack branches on top of each other for individual feature so it's easy for the reviewer to go through the code and and also keep the PR size quite small. Also this gives me freedom to push more than one commit for each branch to fix things.
The only annoying part is that I have to keep on merging the base branch to the feature branch constantly to keep it up-to date. If Github can provide a feature to do that automatically, then that would be perfect. Other than that, I don't see any advantage on this stacked PR approach they are proposing.
There are already laws and standards in almost every country. In this particular example, the people completely ignored all the privacy and data protection laws.
Don't blame the AI for what is clearly gross human negligence. It's like renovating your entire house and then acting surprised when the pipes burst because you used duct tape as a permanent fix.
At least part of the negligence is about the people who knowingly promote AI without also promoting knowledge of the limitations. Those who post stories about vibe-coding XXX in a week and don't bother to point out that they have no idea if it's not a piece of crap, waiting to explode, because there's no way they could have tested it properly in a week let alone read the mountains of code produced.
There's a hype machine working and lots of people riding on it.
That's what is meant by human negligence. There will always be a hype about something and that is not an excuse to have a devil may care attitude on any work being done
Negligence depends on what you believe to be true. If you're being told "this is possible and the AI will do it properly you don't have to worry" then it's not negligence really - on the part of the person who believes what they are told.
For the rest of us it is about being put under pressure by managers who don't understand whether to believe what you say or what they read about vibe coding on some linked-in post. As far as they are concerned you're not the authority and some hype-ster is.
> "this is possible and the AI will do it properly you don't have to worry" then it's not negligence really
Then that's lack of due diligence and and any manager is forcing you to ignore that, you should report them to compliance team. You cannot blame everyone else and bear no responsibility for your actions. If you decide to vibe code blindly and ignore all the laws and standards, then that was your decision and you decided to turn a blind eye.
They watch your AI usage and pressure you to use more. They tell you that "of course you must check the code" but of course if you do then they can start telling you your performance isn't good enough. "Fred is much faster than you" and of course Fred says he checks everything but does he really? To do code reviews he just uses an AI anyhow so nobody catches what the AI doesn't catch. If you check his code carefully in a review and bring up a lot of questions (which he cannot answer because he doesn't know) then you're being "difficult" and dragging the team down.
Is this what I'm experiencing now? perhaps about 70% of it but I can see how it goes. There are lots of companies out there with poor development practices who think that AI will save them. They don't want to prioritise "quality" although they shout about this a lot. They think that somehow they don't deserve to have quality issues if they prioritise speed and features and don't bother to fix any problem until it causes downtime.
Please forgive my cynical view. I have simply had some bad experiences. It's not always easy to do what is right even when it's fully in the company's own best interest.
You do realize that bad management would still be bad management regardless of AI right? "Fred is much faster than you" has been used by management way before AI was there will aways be scenarios like that regardless of AI or any other tool or technology. Blaming bad management on advances on AI is quite naive and it actually doesn't achieve anything. If the management is the problem then you have to address that and fix that and AI has nothing to do it. Today the management would use AI as an excuse and tomorrow they would use the next hype word.
Oh definitely! :-) I just think it's like an amplification of the same old thing. It makes it easier to play that game and harder to counter it.
Fred now generates 5,000 lines of horse-dung that appears to work and management are gob-smacked. It is extremely fragile, has no security and the tests are all autogenerated so nobody knows if they're even testing what is actually important but...
Above the team-lead level, management, product manager etc have no idea what's inside a piece of work that makes it maintainable or secure or anything else and all they see is their idea realised and the person who did it has a golden halo so you cannot say a single negative thing about the work without a tonne of shit pouring on you.
This has happened to me. It was in the days when ChatGPT was much worse than it is now and the code was almost one big hallucination - indescribable how bad it was. The only advantage I had was that the whole team, other than Fred of course, rejected the PR. It caused a world of horrible problems though and incredible behavior from "Fred" and yet he was able to get away with it until he finally stepped so far over the line that nobody could support him. It caused other team members to leave though so it was a disaster.
Your case sounds pretty extreme, like a combination of multiple toxic factors and I still don't think it is due to AI. Fred still could have pushed bad code without the help of AI and the situation would be the same. In this case the problem is Fred, not AI. It's the human negligence of Fred that caused the issue. Even if you ban using AI in your company, still Fred would behave the same and find a different way to be toxic.
Are duct tape manufacturers and their investors constantly hyping about how duct tape is the future, and how it is making professional plumbing obsolete?
I assume you haven't seen those advertisements where they put duct tapes on everything and present it as a universal solution, also there will always be a hype about something in this world and that is not an excuse to jump on the bandwagon unless you're braindead
As someone living in Germany, the alternative would be snail mail, which is used to send a pre-authentication code, username and then another code. This is pretty common with insurance providers, German traditional banks, etc. However, the annoying part is that if you ever forget or lose the code, then you would have to request a new one via mail that would arrive like 2 weeks after.
The alternative is a secure physical device and that's also the correct way to go if you insist on having online ID checks and take digital sovereignty seriously instead of making it a joke lip service like these implementers do.
I work in a big corporation in Europe. Officially we're only allowed to use CoPilot, but a lot of people just have their own subscriptions. Management either turns a blind eye or is actively encouraging investigating other AI solutions.
Of course, people need to take care of confidentiality, data protection and all that, but a lot of work is just not affected by those concerns.
> This was mostly due to second line pushing back because of data protection, data privacy and all other regulatory requirement and bureaucratic paperwork
Fintec startup. Fintech. Handling people's money. Handling a lot of extremely sensitive data. Complaining that they have to deal with some "bullshit bureacracy about the things like privacy and data regulations or something".
It's the German / European version of unions. For instance when I joined an ex-public company 25 years ago unions were very active in the UK still, but they are even more active in Germany etc.
I've been using an iPhone since 2017 and the only times I use Siri is to set an alarm or to play Music. Setting an alarm works like 90% of the time. Playing music on the other hand is a coin toss. Most of the time it fails because it plays the wrong song, cannot understand what I say or just refuse to play and ask me to unlock the phone because I'm not using apple music.
Even if somehow EU is able to pull this off it would be a nightmare in terms of user experience. I live in Germany and this is how I would imagine it would work base on my experience in Germany.
1. You first need to install an app (because you want to use tap to pay)
2. Then you need to download another app to authenticate the first app
3. But to set up the 2nd app you need to wait for an actual physical mail which contains a code.
4. Then you set up the 2nd app, but then again it asks for you to do a KYC using your Id Card.
5. Now you need to download another app to do the KYC using your Id, but it asks for another code which you receive by physical mail when you got your Id years ago, but you have no idea where that mail or code is, now you have to request for another code and wait like 2 weeks till you get a physical mail with that code....
Then every app has to be always the latest version working only with the recent smartphone operating systems, of course the authentication is invalidated on app upgrade. They'll make sure to turn in into some insolvable hellish paradox.
You forgot the part where they send you two distinct snail mails, one with the username and one with a one-time password, for a double chance the post will lose one of the envelopes!
Or the part where they silently truncate your new password to 6 digits because muh security.
I guess France and Germany are siblings in kafkaesque administrative shenanigans.
In Germany if they silently truncate your password and you contact their customer service, they will scream at you for not remembering your password. I guess this beats France.
I honestly wonder whether the EU can afford to spend on technological sovereignty. With an aging population and the need to maintain welfare states, governments will have to allocate more and more of future budgets to expanding and sustaining welfare programs (statutory health insurance, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc.). That ultimately means higher taxes, a larger government workforce, and a shrinking private sector. Maybe they will have enough money to maintain the existing status quo, but not sure where the additional capital would come from to invest in digital sovereignty.
"EU welfare state" is a meme that doesn't survive looking closely at the actual figures. Especially if you compare things like state pensions properly; the US moves these into a different column labelled "social security", but that doesn't mean they're not part of the state!
Note that the alternative is sending money overseas to rent US infrastructure. It may make a lot of sense to deploy spending locally where it stays in the economy rather than overseas, a standard "import substitution" play.
but the US is somehow simultaneously less of a welfare/nanny state. I suppose that is a tell: it's not about the actual monetary amounts, but about the national priorities posture and political alignment.
I call bullshit. China's software industry boomed when they blocked/hobbled western big tech companies that would have strangled them. Slater kicked of America's textile industrialization. Every country that I know that has implemented a quota system in the arts has resulted in the domestic industry blossoming and getting over the self-sustaining hump.
It is self-evident that limiting competition is beneficial to the protected parties.
While the EU welfare is not that much larger than the US (maybe 5% more of GDP), the US also has much more money, a larger portion of the population working, and higher population growth. They also have the technical and business knowledge in tech that the EU lacks (e.g. silicon, rocketry, hyperscalers, etc).
It also has an ever-increasing amount of debt and an aging population, e.g. the US is expected to spend more than $1 trillion a year on the interest on the debt itself, or $7,800 per household per year.
Most of the "digital sovereignty" stuff is spending money on companies that intend to sell services at a profit and pay taxes on it. So they absolutely can afford to do it (and governments have more routes to getting money back than just exits) provided you back the right companies. That's probably more easily achieved in digital sovereignty than space launch though.
You mean government subsidizing the companies and taxing them in return? How is that a viable model? Also subsidizing means tax payers put on the burden and there is no guarantee that the companies subsidized by the governments would turn a profit or just burn through the subsidies and go bankrupt.
> You mean government subsidizing the companies and taxing them in return?How is that a viable model?
You're asking how it can be viable to give money to unprofitable companies in the hope that some of them will repay it by becoming very profitable in future on a website run by YC? Really?
Investing in infrastructure and economy and playing lotto with tax payers money in random companies is two different things. By your definition the government could just put all tax money into stock market and hope for the best.
Investing money in the stock market doesn't meaningfully improve the economy. Unless by economy we mean the stock market of course. Sure, if you have run out of better investment options and still have money left over that's a decent strategy (Norway's sovereign wealth fund would be a good example). But usually there are better investments available for governments. Buying goods and services from local companies is one such better investment, since it directly benefits those companies, not just their stock holders and managers
The EU has the capacity, but will be working closely with other partners like India, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Vietnam, and the UAE as capital and/or technology partners.
For example, Eutelsat - which is providing the backbone for GOVSATCOM and IRIS2 - is a three-way partnership between India's Bharti Group (Sunil Mittal), the French, and the UK. Or GCAP where Japan's Mitsubishi Group is acting as both a technology and capital partner to Italy and the UK.
This was also a major driver behind the EU-India Defense Pact and the EU-Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership - both of which were overshadowed by the EU-India FTA.
A multilateral organization like the EU has the muscle to integrate and cooperate with other partners, which is something that shouldn't be underestimated, as this builds resilience via redundancy.
Edit: Interesting how this is the second time [0] in the past few weeks where an HN comment I wrote that was optimistic about the EU's capacity was downvoted. There's a reason the PRC is still conducting industrial espionage on EU institutions [1].
> Interesting how this is the second time [0] in the past few weeks where an HN comment I wrote that was optimistic about the EU's capacity was downvoted.
Nothing new there, but I wouldn't assume Chinese bot army being behind it. The Russians, American MAGA, European alt-right each have an interest in such suppression (and RU and USA also conduct industrial espionage on EU). You may assume each of these parties is present in a thread about European sovereignty, but either way the mods discourage any discussion about moderation. You're best off emailing one of them.
Absolutely, but negating and distracting from the fact that EU governments have been publicly calling out Chinese disinfo ops [0][1] over the past 2-3 years to a degree not seen since Russia began hybrid warfare against the EU in the 2010s is unneccesary.
Sovereignty doesn't mean autarky - it means having the capacity to maintain operations and pivot should a black swan event arise.
The EU is a transnational bloc that has had experience helping it's member states find niches of competitive advantage and take full advantage of that.
Germany doesn't need to fully replicate Denmark's biopharma pipeline nor does Denmark have the need to fully replicate Germany's nuclear submarine IP because both can and have continued to coexist with each other and build resilience through additonal partnerships which prevent one from dominating the other.
This is the modus operandi of EU soverignity - integrate players into following a set of collective norms and aligning each other's incentives with the larger collective.
This is why EU's grand strategy incorporates the industrial base of other regional powers like Japan, SK, India, Vietnam, Canada, Australia, UAE, Israel, etc because it increasingly aligns all these regional powers against domination from either the US or China.
France and Israel have been collaborating on defense technology for decades - it was France that helped Israel become a nuclear power [0]. There are similar collaborations with Czechia [1], Estonia [2], Lithuania [3], Romania [4] and Germany [5].
Additionally, Israel has a defense pact with Greece and Cyprus to protect them against Turkish aggression [6], which is more than what other EU states are providing to Greece and Cyprus.
This is why Israel is a critical part of the EU's multilateral defense fabric - Eastern Mediterranean and CEE EU member states are already close partners with Israel.
1.) not all cee countries are pro-israel. Especially Poland as the biggest country there is rather anti - Israel.
2.) Most European countries and almost eu countries are part of NATO. Thus Greece is protected by Article 5. In addition there is Article 42 from the EU. In a.potential Cyprus - Greece - Turkey Eu has more to offer than Israel military wise.
Enough are though, and the EU is robust enough to support dissent between states. The Baltics will gladly take anyone's support against Russian aggression.
> Thus Greece is protected by Article 5
Cyprus is not protected by Article 5 as it's NATO assension has been blocked by Turkiye. And Greece has been Cyprus' defense guaranteer since independence in 1960. Any attack on Cyprus is an attack on Greece as both Greeks and Cypriots are the same ethnic group and deeply tied economically, socially, and militarily.
> In addition there is Article 42 from the EU. In a.potential Cyprus - Greece - Turkey Eu has more to offer than Israel military wise
Cyprus and Greece cannot count on Article 42 as Turkiye has strong defense and commercial ties with Spain [0] and Italy [1], which leads to a timid EU response as was seen in 2024 during the Greek-Turkish naval standoff [5].
As such, Greece+Cyprus have turned to trilateral treaties with France [2], Israel, and India [3][4] as a fallback.
This is why Israel has been included in EU defense deals and partnerships - it provides a large portion of the EU defense cover while allowing the EU to bypass inter-EU conflicts.
> With an aging population and the need to maintain welfare states, governments will have to allocate more and more of future budgets to expanding and sustaining welfare programs (statutory health insurance, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc.). That ultimately means higher taxes, a larger government workforce, and a shrinking private sector.
And China excluding the welfare part - China has an extremely weak welfare system for a state at it's economic level and the Xi admin remains deeply opposed to what it derogatorily terms as "Welfarism" [0].
china has been an invaluable partner. Green energy supplies a large part of energy consumed in europe now, and car electrification has become popular thanks to cheap chinese EVs. I will not be surprised to see chinese drones or weapons too
The PRC has stated it will continue to back Russia against Ukraine [0] which is a red line for the EU. Additionally, the PRC has been running disinfo ops against EU member states tech exports [1] while still attempting industrial espionage on European institutions [2].
China will not become a trusted partner of the EU as long as:
1. It continues to conduct industrial espionage against EU institutions
2. Attempts to undermine EU industrial and dual use exports
3. It continues to support Russia diplomatically and materially at the expense of Ukraine
4. It attempts to undermine the EU as an institution [3][4][5][6]
5. It continues to threaten EU nationals through physical [7] and legal [8] intimidation.
It's the same reason trust has reduced in the US as well.
Better dealing with neither in that case - which is the what the EU is doing.
This is why the EU has made a defense and technology partnerships with India (Arunachal) [0], Vietnam (Hoang Sa) [1], Japan (Senkaku) [2], and South Korea (Yellow Sea) [3] and is indirectly supporting Taiwan [4].
Interesting how you also ignore the fact that the PRC has attempted to personally harm EU nationals in the past 2 years through physical and legal intimidation.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted - I'm wondering the same thing. Catching up is inherently more expensive than just maintaining a lead. And on top of that the EU pensioners will oppose any reallocation of resources outside of their retirement / pension schemes. The EU does have more fiscal headroom than the US, ie. lower debt per GDP and lower debt per capita - so through borrowing they could mobilize some more funds. But that's about it and I'm doubtful that's going to be enough.
I guess a lot of Europeans don't want to see the real logical questioning and downvoting out of pure frustration.
Also EU doesn't have fiscal freedom. Germany is the only country barely keeping it together and without any hard reform France is a ticking time bomb when it come to its debt-to-GDP.
US has a huge advantage compared to France. US has the control of its currency and can devalue it. France cannot do it since Euro is not controlled by France.
"Arianespace is pathetically behind the times as launch services provider and no one is even cost competitive with SpaceX" types of offhand Internet comments are just literal propaganda with zero substance. [WARN] messages on Linux Kernel consoles bear more importance than those.
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