A big problem in computer security these days is all-or-nothing security: either you can’t do anything, or you can do everything.

I have no interest in agentic AI, but if I did, I would want it to have very clearly specified permission to certain folders, processes and APIs. So maybe it could wipe the project directory (which would have backup of course), but not a complete harddisk.

And honestly, I want that level of granularity for everything.

This technology is wasted on smartphones. We need this on laptop screens.

Yeah, why talk about preemptive strikes when they’re still not responding appropriately to the invasion of Ukraine? Kick Russia out of there first. That’s a totally legitimate non-preemptive way to block Russian aggression. That’s how you show strength, not with words that help the Russian narrative.

That joke, about just uploading everything and letting others decide what’s worth saving, is one I first heard decades ago. Might still have been him who first made it.

Different generations. They didn’t get each other’s cultural references.

Pay workers the bare minimum they need to survive, and have them spend all their waking hours working for you. That’s how you get rich, apparently.

Warhammer? This sounds not far from the most horrific mission from a Shadowrun campaign I ran. They were making the new internet out of human brains.

“In science fiction, people have been living with these ideas for quite a long time,” he said.

That doesn’t mean you should do it for real.

Alcohol isn’t quite as dramatic or hard to detect, but you shouldn’t be sneaking alcohol into people’s non-alcoholic drinks either. Or otherwise intentionally get them drunk. That’s only for them to decide.

No. Drugging them is enough of a threat even if the culprit doesn’t manage to rape his victim. Treating at attempt to drug someone with a date rape drug as assault sounds like it might be a very good idea. Though I admit I haven’t thought about all the angles yet.

Are your unaware that you are arguing towards a tautology? “It’s not overvalued because this is what it’s valued”. That’s meaningless.

If the assets, profits and projected growth do not justify the current valuation, it’s overvalued. That’s the case for Tesla.

I don’t think these numbers quite add up. It says $93B a year, vs $21.9T over a decade. So that’s $2.19 per year, or a a bit over 20 times as much. So fixing hunger costs slightly less than 5% of the world’s military budget.

Still a more worthy way to spend that money, but let’s get the numbers correct.

That doesn’t mean that value is reasonable, though. The stockmarket has a rich history of hysteria and irrationality.

By that argument nothing is ever overvalued because apparently that’s what the stockmarket says it’s worth. But crashes still happen.

It’s realer than vibe coding.

Honestly I don’t think it’s any of our business. Even rich assholes are allowed to have a private life. Although with some (Musk, Trump) that private life is so fucked up it’s impossible to ignore, but generally I’m totally fine with not knowing who they fuck.

That’s just a “the stockmarket can’t possibly be wrong” argument, but the stockmarket has often been wrong.

Tesla is overvalued. That’s blatantly obvious if you look at the data. There’s no justification for Tesla’s insane market cap other than hype or corruption.

Did you not understand the Corolla/Lamborghini example?

I do, but I wonder if you do. Toyota is far, far more valuable than Lamborghini. Toyota is the largest car manufacturer in the world, and with a market cap of $269B, the second most valuable after Tesla.

Lamborghini is not independent, but owned by Volkswagen, as part of their Audi group, and all of those brands put together have a market cap of $58B.

Your argument is not a justification for Tesla’s high market value; quite the opposite.

There’s more to a car than speed, and Teslas aren’t Lamborghinis. They were exciting when they were new, but they’ve always had quality issues. Toyota produces more reliable cars. And more cars. There’s no perspective from which Tesla’s valuation makes sense.

I can live without documentation and comments, but then you’ve got to write really well-structured, self-documenting code. Which means long variable names (or better: local constants) that describe exactly what’s in them, and function names that describe clearly what the function is for, and readable code that shows what it does.

But perhaps expecting that kind of discipline from people who lack the discipline to write documentation, was not entirely realistic.

The system I’m working on is shit. The devs all know it, the users all complain about it. It needs to be fixed, and not only do I seem to be the person most driven to fix it, it turns out I’ve been hired explicitly to replace the shittiest part of it. So that’s actually pretty good, right?

Except my PO doesn’t quite want me to do that yet. First, he needs me to shovel more shit onto it. Shit that’s going to be the first stuff that I’ll replace once I get to replace stuff, and then that stuff will be a lot easier, whereas now it would be a lot harder and too slow to be useable. But new features are more important than making this useable.

He’s a nice guy, but he doesn’t get technical priorities, and priorities are the primary responsibility for a PO.

There have always been undisciplined soldiers with a tendency to rape, pillage, loot, etc. It has never been acceptable, and certainly in more recent times it has been declared utterly illegal. We’ve got the Geneva Convention against that sort of thing.

Any country whose soldiers do this, shows itself to be depraved and lacking in military discipline. It’s a barbaric act, unbecoming of civilised countries.