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What websites a person is allowed to access should not be a matter of debate, it is for the individual to decide. Other people's opinions are not relevant. Even if 99% of people think a person should not be able to access a website, it is still their right to do so and they have no need to justify it.

Democracy is for deciding what to do with taxpayer money. It shouldn't be a mechanism by which people can vote to take away other people's freedoms.


> Democracy is for deciding what to do with taxpayer money. It shouldn't be a mechanism by which people can vote to take away other people's freedoms.

This is a child-like argument. Pretty much every law such as requiring you to wear a seatbelt takes away your freedoms.


Does that apply to websites full of CSAM, or that sell for-hire animal torture real-time streaming services, or that provide hitman hiring services, or...


I think your view on how government and the internet works is somewhat outdated. Social media is not just "what websites a person is allowed access to" and government is so much more than what we do with taxpayer money.

The US is evidently a poor example of what a fully formed government is so I wouldn't use that as a basis for one's world view.


Legal reform is needed to prevent American companies from complying with foreign censorship laws.

What happens if a tech company decides to follow EU law worldwide, just because it's more convenient than blocking some stuff just in the EU? That shouldn't be allowed.


> Legal reform is needed to prevent American companies from complying with foreign censorship laws.

I cannot imagine why any US American company would comply with an unenforceable foriegn enforcement notice.


because they want to keep foreign paying customers not just domestic


An unenforcable enforcement notice won't lose them customers.


Tell that to rt.com or ThePirateBay or Sci-Hub

none of which are accessible directly from the UK.

and rt.com is super secret blocked


> Tell that to rt.com or ThePirateBay or Sci-Hub > none of which are accessible directly from the UK.

Not due any *unenforcable" enforcement notice, right?

Anyway, SciHub.org is accessible directly from UK on both ISPs where I am.


Oh right, Sci-Hub has changed, I didn't know.

What I meant was it doesn't matter if they don't voluntarily eventually they'll just be locked out of the market and their staff issued with arrest warrants should they set foot in the UK. It's not just a debt, it's a crime.


How do you know it was the SSRI?

To cherry-pick a quote from a review of SSRI studies:

>the magnitude of symptom reduction was about 40% with antidepressants and about 30% with placebo.

That tells me that antidepressants have some effectiveness, but placebos work shockingly well. You can give someone a sugar pill with no medical properties whatsoever, and a good portion of people will recover, likely crediting the pill for their recovery.


The fight is not just about privacy, it is about freedom. Age-gating websites violates the freedom of people who are under a certain age. Young people have the same rights to free expression and information access as anyone else.


Try giving this prompt to your favorite LLM:

"Write unit tests with full line and branch coverage for this function:

def add_two_numbers(x, y): return x + y + 1 "

Sometimes the LLM will point out that this function does not, in fact, return the sum of x and y. But more often, it will happily write "assert add_two_numbers(1, 1) == 3", without comment.

The big problem is that LLMs will assume that the code they are writing tests for is correct. This defeats the main purpose of writing tests, which is to find bugs in the code.


Tip: teach it how to write tests properly. I’ll share what has worked pretty well for me.

Run Cursor in “agent” mode, or create a Codex or Claude Code “unit test” skill. I recommend claude code.

Explain to the LLM that after it creates or modifies a test, it must run the test to confirm it passes. If it fails, it’s not allowed to edit the source code, instead it must determine if there is a bug in the test or the source code. If the test is buggy it should try again, if there is a bug in the source code it should pause, propose a fix, and consult with you on next steps.

The key insight here is you need to tell it that it’s not supposed to randomly edit the source code to make the test pass. I also recommend reviewing the unit tests at a high level, to make sure it didn’t hallucinate.


How about instead of taxes, we have a $10,000 per year subscription fee to live in society.

Maybe different depending on area, like $20,000 a year to live in NYC but only $2,000 per year to live in a rural village.

If you can't afford the fee that's OK, it just means you have to live outside of the developed areas and don't benefit from any services provided by the government. But you are free to set up a tent in the woods and live off the land.


Would this mean that a person that makes 50k/y most pay 20% of their income while a billion$ company still pays 10k? I don't think this helps with wealth inequality.


Neither. Tests should be written by developers only when it saves them time. The cost of writing them should be negative.

Instead of writing hundreds of useless tests so that the code coverage report shows high numbers, it is better to write a couple dozen tests based on business needs and code complexity.


Having used Bentley software products I can tell you with complete certainty that professional software developers have extremely bad judgment when it comes to the need to test software and verify its functionality. Developers just think they know what they’re doing because there’s typically not a strong feedback mechanism that inflicts serious career damage when they do things that are extremely lazy or stupid or unethical. How many people lost their job or had to change their name and live out the rest of their days in Juarez Mexico over AWS’ incomprehensible configuration causing an internet brown out? Anyone? A teenager serves cold onion rings at a burger joint and he’s on the street. Some lazy dweeb at Amazon blows up the internet and - come on, isn’t it about the friends we made along the way? It’s obscene and the lack of professionalism and accountability is a total disgrace.


The main benefit of writing tests is that is forces the developer to think about what they just wrote and what it is supposed to do. I often will find bugs while writing tests.

I've worked on projects with 2,000+ unit tests that are essentially useless, often fail when nothing is wrong, and rarely detect actual bugs. It is absolutely worse than having 0 tests. This is common when developers write tests to satisfy code coverage metrics, instead of in an effort to make sure their code works properly.


Look, you tell the LLMs what kind of tests you want and judge the quality before committing.

If you're letting the LLM create useless test that's on you.

I think you're reading these comments in bad faith as if I'm letting the LLM add slop to satisfy a metric.

No, I'm using an LLM to write good tests that I will personally approve as usefull, and other people will review too, before merging into master.


That sounds like it would penalize renting in favor of homeownership. I'm not in support of that, renting offers people flexibility and is not inherently worse than owning.


Ticket prices going up is actually good for mass adoption. If they are too low, you will see people riding the train who are only using the train because they are too poor to afford a car. That makes middle class people want to avoid the train.

Also higher revenue often means better service, which for most people is more important than the price.


Having used the UK rail service both public and private the "better service" is optimistic. The too poor to afford a car is more associated with buses. You need to be rather fortunate to be poor and able to use the train to get to work. Maybe in London using the tube but working office hours it will be cheaper to buy a car or move. I would suggest the main driver in the leap in passenger numbers isnt the far superior private sector offering but instead the massive leap in house prices forcing people to move out of London.


I don’t think these points are accurate at all for people in the UK. There isn’t really a class divide, you ride trains in particular because it’s theoretically the most time efficient way to travel within metro areas and potentially across the country. Increased prices have not resulted in better service, and it’s purely a method to price gouge those who have no feasible travel alternatives.


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