Here's Anthropic claiming that Alibaba created 25k free accounts to crawl them: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/anthropic-claims-alibaba-defied-trump-to-attack-claude-and-steal-capabilities/

Oh, my bad then. Yes: you were right.

Surely the problem with "woke" is that right-wing media grabbed it as a boogeyman and plastered it everywhere, right? I mean, what does it even mean to say "[woke] tried to solve ... issues". It's a word. It doesn't have any agency.

The only definition I've ever heard (because right-wingers don't attempt to define it) is "awareness of systemic discrimination (particularly by the USA towards black americans)". If a handful of people talking about how the USA has some bad history and what that means for the country today... The same people getting their feelings hurt over "woke" are just going to get them hurt over some other word that they make up. Like if nobody had ever heard of "woke" they'd be crying about "diversity" (oh wait they are) or "justice" or "peace" or literally anything because words don't have meaning to that crowd beyond something to get offended over.

"Exactly as horrible" is unfair to you. But it sounds like you're advocating to give up on rule of law and just have the strongest most violent people be the ones to decide what's right. And I'd argue that you'd just get back to where we are right now: wealthy people would control the system, they'd employ strong violent people to enforce their personal whims as "law", and you'd be complaining that nobody is willing to beat up the pedophile (because his friends would hire goons to kill them).

I mean, presumably that's what's stopping you personally from implementing your own recommendation, right? Because if you showed up and kicked this guy's ass you'd be beaten and arrested by the police.

There are automated checks which can help enforce correctness of the parts of the code that are being checked. For example, we could imagine a check that says "when I add a sprite to the list of assets, then the list of assets becomes one item longer than it was before". And if I wrote code that had a bug here, the automated check would catch it and show the problem without any humans needing to take the time.

But since code can do whatever you write it to do, there's always human review needed. If I wrote code so that adding a sprite also sent a single message to my enemy's Minecraft server then it's not going to fail any tests or show up anywhere, but we need humans to look at the code and see that I'm trying to turn other developers into a DDoS engine.

As others replied, you could choose to find and run someone's branch. This actually does happen with open-source projects: the original author disappears or abandons the project, other people want changes, and someone says "hey I have a copy of the project but with all those changes you want" and we all end up using that fork instead.

But as a tool for evaluating code that'll get merged, it does not work. Imagine you want to check out the new bleeding-edge version of Godot. There's currently ~4700 possible bleeding-edge versions, so which one will you use? You can't do this organically.

Most big projects do have something like beta releases. The humans decide what code changes to merge and they do all that and produce a new godot-beta. The people who want to test out the latest stuff use that and report problems which get fixed before they finally release the finished version to the public. But they could never just merge in random crap and then see if it was a good idea afterward.

This is like voting for US Republicans like, "what, Trump already controls the country and this dude disagrees with him."

Rowling has said that (1) she will spend all HP profits on hurting trans people and (2) she registers all HP support as support for her agenda.

The theory is that the new hire gets better over time

It always amazes me how few people get this. Have they only ever made terrible hires?

The way that a company makes big profits is by hiring fresh graduates and giving them a cushy life while they grow into good SWEs. By the time you're paying $200k for a senior software engineer, they're generating far more than that in value. And you only had to invest a couple years and some chump change.

But now businesses only think in the short-term and so paying $10k for a month of giving Anthropic access to our code base sounds like a bargain.

Executives are mostly irrelevant as long as they’re not forcing the whole company into the bullshit.

I'm seeing a lot of this, though. Like, I'm not technically required to use AI, but the VP will send me a message noting that I've only used 2k tokens this month and maybe I could get more done if I was using more...?

The disconnect is coming here:

I just don’t see the line where any of that is impossible. It seems inevitable

I agree with you that robots building robots is not impossible. I disagree with you that it's therefore inevitable. I strongly disagree with you that it's therefore inevitable in the immediate future.

Do you already know some French Canadians? The best and most fun way to learn a language is by talking with people. If you know someone who speaks a language you want to learn and they're willing to struggle through talking with you, pick that language.

If you're trying to let the non-wealthy Belgians off the hook for it, I'm mostly down. The above comments were all specifically about royalty and Leopold II.

And genocide always (?) turns out to be built around greed. Israelis might hate the Palestinians, but the reason to kill and enslave them is to steal their land and profit from their labor.

Actual UML-according-to-some-books is old and unpopular now. I think C4 is taking its place, in that I've seen architect-types ask for it. More generally, I really like PlantUML and the prettier-looking Mermaid which both allow me to code diagrams using a text document.

Yeah, I agree: academia gets people expecting to go, "give me 2x Visitor Pattern, then 1 Builder Pattern, then as many Divide and Conquers as you need to reach the end". It can be nice to have a name for things, but most of the time I'm asking for, "see how the setup, actual work, and cleanup are nicely divided up? Do like that." Or, "let's put all the related endpoints in the same file."