Either the tech industry solves this, or governments will. That’s not ideology, it’s capitalism. If we don’t build workable, privacy-preserving primitives, regulation will arrive in the most blunt form possible.

There’s a reasonable middle ground. Identity can be a first-class citizen without being leaked to every website. I don’t need to hand over my name, address, or documents to prove I’m over 18. I need a yes/no assertion.

Imagine the browser exposing a capability like:

> “This site requires age verification. Are you over 18?”

The browser checks via a trusted third party credential and returns a boolean. No DOB. No tracking. No persistent identifier. Just a capability check, much closer to how physical ID works than today’s data-harvesting mess.

As a parent, I already police my kids as best I can, and it’s imperfect. But the offline world has friction and gates: bars check ID, cinemas enforce ratings, shops refuse sales. Those mitigations don’t make parents redundant; they support them.

Online, we’ve chosen to pretend none of that is possible. That’s not a principled privacy stance.

If we don’t design these primitives ourselves, we will get crude, insecure age databases, mandatory uploads of passports, or blanket bans instead. This is the least bad option, not a slippery slope. Collectively we have solved far harder problems.

https://zed.dev/docs/linux

But in all seriousness, LLMs have their strengths but we’re all wasting tokens and burning the planet unnecessarily getting LLMs to work so inefficiently. Use the best tool for the job; make the tools easier to use by LLMs. This mantra is applicable generally. Not just for coding.

Then Covid. Then Ukraine. Prices surged. Wages didn’t. A decade of inflation stacked up while pay stood still. For many, that was a silent pay cut.

Truss turned strain into crisis. Unfunded tax cuts. Markets panicked. Gilt yields spiked. Mortgage costs jumped overnight. Another blow to households already on the edge.

So we end up where CNN reports: record child poverty, even among full-time workers; parents unable to cover the basics as the social architecture collapses.

Into that anger steps Reform UK. They offer a protest vote. But their plan is the same old mix: deep cuts, a smaller state, and migration as the scapegoat. The very recipe that helped bring us here.

Send help :-(

I started off TDD covered the basics. Learned what I needed to learn about the files I'm dealing with, edge cases, sqlglot and then I moved onto Hypothesis for extra confidence.

I'm curious to see if it'll help with commands for APIs. I nothing else it'll help me appreciate how liberal my API is when perhaps I don't want it to be?