I doubt I'm unique.

The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.

I'm never going back to it, but I do think it's the best it's ever been.

This was not because of vandalism, but because of how hard it was to update OSM when you don't do it often and might not look trustworthy. In Danish cities we have a complicated relationship with cars, we don't want them, but we do want the people they bring. One of the obstacles we create is having a lot of one way streets, and when OSM gets an error on those... well... suddenly there is a lot of addresses you simply can't reach. I once updated one of these errors with a photo from the internet, and it was rejected after a few miniutes because I had used an image from the internet which is (was?) against the TOS. Unfortunately the company we bought the API from was not doing any form of validation, so we had a week where our 5000 employess couldn't registerer driving to the most commonly used adress in the neighbouring city. I posted all sorts of documentation proving my official function, and had a discussion with the admins and even though they agreed I was right they refused to let me correct the mistake without real evidence. So eventually I drove my bicycle the 50km to the location, took some pictures and a couple with silly hats and submitted them and got my correction.

Once we had a local copy of the danish map we had no issues. I assume you would do this for any app relying on working routing data.

You'd have to specifically task it with disabling default safeguards to make this happen.

I majored in history. I'd say the data is misleading. I drew a boy "In the Ganges Plain, 1411 BCE". According to the summed up data he had a 54% risk of dying of neonatal tetanus, sepsis or dysentery. Which isn't wrong as such, but it would probably have been better to sum it up with all the other diseases, parasites and infections that would be needed to reach the 54%. Like resporatory infections... "Other causes" is listed at 14%, I assume that malnutrition is part of this, but malnutrition would be the leading cause in the 4-8 year age group, and less so in others.

The life stories themselves are over dramatic. Which isn't weird, considering you don't have a lot of source material dealing with the "boring" lives. Like if you think of Scandinavia in the VIKING ages you'll find a lot of research and data on the people who went viking. In reality 95% of the populations were farmers who didn't even see the coast in their lifetimes. Unless the AI is specifically tuned to value the few sources on everyday farmin in Scandinavia higher than the ones published on viking culture in general... Well.. I think you get it.

That being said. Many people probably don't know that you could have 18 children at only see one of them grow to the age of 20 a few hundred years ago. So the data is accurate enough to be educational in my opinion.

I do think the "typical marriage age" might be suffering from AI safe-guards. For most times I've tried it seems to land oddly close to 18. Which is unfortunately much higher than reality.

In the big threat picture a vibe coded web tool that's not on the internet and runs in total isolation on it's own management group on the "this might get hacked" tenant in Azure is nothing though. I'd worry more about all that OT which was compromised from the factory which sits around in the energy sector. Especially because it's very easy to draw you a risk analysis that will tell you that unless you're running a Nuclear Powerplant then it makes no financial sense to secure your stuff. The audits are so rare and the consequences so low that it's cheaper to just pay the fine (if you ever get one).

Most actual security happens when someone on the ground decides that it's just too stupid that something clearly labeled "DO NOT PUT ON THE INTERNET" was put directly on the internet.

If you really want to go into it, I've previously talked about how we used AI tools provided to us by one of our major investors who do so for all the companies they are invested into. These were also Anthropic and OpenAI models. The main difference is that Cowork has access to files on a users one drive (and that we get a lot more control over what goes into it).

I still doubt we will ever give an AI access to run code on our systems directly though. In isolation, sure, but other than that.

This is a side note, but my personal favorite part of Cowork is that I can roll out our compliance policy to every developer as a Microsoft Teams app (no, that makes no sense to me either). So when they try to install some package that isn't pre-approved their Cowork agent won't let them and will instead explain how they might get approval. If they then continue to reference it, Cowork will even alert us.

From an enterprise perspective this becomes complicated for various reasons. RBAC is one area. In the perfect world you have a system to handle roles and rights to every system, something that you can give managers access to so they can maintain the access available to their employees, something linked with HR. In reality you have EntraID with a hieracy which is sort of automated by HR data, but not really, because sometimes HR puts everyone on the CEO level by mistake, and, if you trusted HR as authoritative that would've just broken all the EU laws. So you have all those Entra groups and you need IT Operations to maintain them and since you want to build it on job roles and not people you'll typically not be able to maintain them in the off the shelf system. Which means that you would have had to build a web portal for the plant managers manager where they could maintain a couple of Entra groups in a web interface. That or you'll have to setup an IT support flow where you add yet another system that IT has to maintain access for.

Then we get to the actual customization. Maybe you buy a custom API on top of your BC365 platform. Maybe your C-levels deciced that paying €50k a year to avoid outages on major updates isn't worth the cost. Then when things predictably and completely avoidable fail you're going to hav to deal with the literal shitstorm. You'd think that all the people being locked out of their jobs and the €150k cost of getting an immediate and prioritised update to the system would mean you'd start paying for that $50k service after this. You'd be wrong. Ok, to be fair, in this particular example it would be a different scenario. For a small system like this you'd find a cheap consultant house in your area and get them to build the customization for you. Only they would outsource it to some solo developer who will build it in a way that basically requires that specific person to alter it. Then when it breaks or needs to be customized futher a year down the line, that person is no longer a solo developer. So you reach out to another cheap consultant house and do it all over again, from scratch.

This doesn't even mention how poorly all those 300 off the shelf systems work together. I mean, I don't maintain a SDK delivering a way to use Apache-Arrow to write and read parquet files from our datalake in the same manner for fun. I do it because those 600 container apps which basically simply translate data from one system to another need it to be as slim as possible.

Am I jaded? Sure. But who isn't in enterprise IT?

As you point out this portal isn't that, but what protects us is the processes around compliance. This can't grow from X to Y because not even the CEO has the authority to overwrite our compliance gates. The EU is a tremendous help in this area since personal liability changed things completely.

Don't get me wrong. It's not great. It would never pass any of our policies for things that actually operate stuff on the power grid, but as an administrative tool that can live in total isolation from the vital networks. It's perfectly fine. It's also not like we would have hired the best software companies to build it otherwise. We'd hire some low-level cheap consultant house who would then likely get cheap student labour to build it. With that in mind though, the AI is much better than what the realistic alternative would be.

Money wise it's also cheaper. It's been roughly €1000 + the time it's taken us both. If I had known they were doing it, I would have rolled out the developer cowork app/skills/whateveryoucallconfigurationsthesedays to them. This would have avoided their AI building it to be depoyed on a VM rather than in our managed k8s in our Azure. It would also have written the code a little different, used UV and maybe django rather than flask. But hey. For what it is, it's like a 90% cost saving compared to buying what would've been a less maintainable and lower quality system.

I think perhaps the greater issue will be finding people who want to extract the gold from the heap of shit and getting it to run in production. I don't personally mind, but it's not like any of my colleagues would've wanted the task.

MMO's let you go online and be social and build communities. WoW did that really well back then. Eventually as things went on, MMO's got more and more tools that let you avoid building those communities. Like the dungeon finder in WoW. I think a lot of MMO's and games in general turned to letting peope get their dopamine fix from increasing numbers through RNG rather than being social.

I know people who stuck around with WoW because of the social communities they build. One of the guilds I was in 20 years ago still meets up in the real world, I know because one of my old friends still plays. I also know people who stuck around because of what is essentially the idle gambling. I became a jock of sorts back around the burning crusade release because I had to put a lot of focus into water polo training. Which meant I didn't do a whole lot "nerdy" stuff for a decade. Once I started doing "nerdy" things again it was easy to find people near me because everyone is a "nerd" these days.

I rarely speak about it but something about reading you accepting the failure of your ambitions made me want to do it. Are you sure it's a failure? For me family life turned out to be what I wanted and work is just a fun place which makes me money, but I totally get why people want to do it the opposite way. In some ways you could say that I did something significant, but it made me misserable. So I failed just as much as you, if not more.

I don't regret any of it either though. It's what made me who I am.

I would say that this is very on point. Even during the renaissance "inventing" was a hobby for the aristocracy, as the author gets around with Giovanni Fontana. I'm not sure if a bicycle would've been a "cool" invention at the time. Because what would you do with it?

For the majority of people there was very little need for personal mobility in society. I know we have this nice fantasy idea of towns having taverns and getting visitors, but in reality, most towns didn't even get what we'd consider a modern pub until the industrial revolution. Sure there were ale houses, but an ale house wasn't a permanent establishment, it was simply whomever had most recentely brewed beer. You'd bring your own chair, and your own cup. So even if you had a bicycle you would frankly have nowhere to go.

Unless you're speaking about a specific Ceuta incident in 2021, in that case just ignore me.