So I'm not onboard with the "just block everything by default" crowd. If you frame the question as "Would you like ads to be more relevant to you" instead of "Do you want to allow tracking" you probably get a very different answer from users.

I would like the cookie banner to be changed to a browser setting, but I also would like the option to allow some sites to show relevant ads to me.

I, for one, am excited to see what the future holds. (side note: I live in a European country with a strong social safety net, I imagine that helps being unafraid)

This is basically a GET request that can have a body. I've found myself in need of that more than once when I did not want huge URLs with encoded data showing up in logs. Using POST request there is not appropriate because it signals data could be modified (i.e. cannot be sent to read-only instances). I guess modifying the spec to allow GET to have a body would pose too many problems.

So we end up with expensive consultants doing the work. Consultants have the wrong incentive. They don't want to stay in one place to long because it looks bad on their resume and overruns mean more money for them.

So really, I can see why a seasoned politician chooses the safest option for him. By the time an overrun occurs he will have moved on to the next job. I don't think left or right-wing politics has much to do with this dynamic. How will a left-wing politician magically get capable IT staff that higher paying industry can't even get enough of?

So you have to weigh the risks of outsourcing to the risk of the whole thing becoming very late and very expensive. The risks around outsourcing are something further down the line, the risks of everything becoming expensive and late are something that will give the responsible politician a headache now.

"While we follow industry best practices that align closely with the requirements of SOC2 and similar frameworks, we have chosen not to pursue formal certification at this time. Maintaining multiple certifications and undergoing recurring audits across the various regions in which we operate would significantly increase our operational costs and, consequently, the price of our service."

I wonder if this is going to give text based accounting a boost. Reviewing clearly worded git commits is so much more reassuring then letting an LLM drive your accounting package and hoping it doesn't mess up somewhere.

For this reason I tell my LLMs to use Ruby whenever possible. In one rare case where the performance of my script was critical, I told Claude to convert the working ruby script to Rust. It got it right in a single shot.

However, I have multiple Macs where I simply have a USB-C laptop SSD attached for Time Machine and they have worked without issue for years. These laptop SSDs come in huge sizes nowadays, and you don't need an especially performant one, so they can be pretty cheap.

So the headline seems to be more "high profile person attacked by lunatic" than "OpenAI CEO attacked for being evil".

It was a mistake to conflate flexible power delivery and data transfer, you rarely need both at the same time. It's possible to design a better and cheaper 3 or 4 pin power delivery standard that can use higher power. But the law now says USB-C and good luck ever changing that.

If you are worried about the slippery slope, then you are really worried that democracy does not work as intended. (And depending on where you live that may be a very reasonable worry). By the way, Nazi Germany was not really a surveillance state, perhaps you are thinking of East Germany?