edit: I took too long to write this :)

At work, we are in a certain kind of race. In life, we are in a certain other kind. To paraphrase a recent Brandon Sanderson talk about creativity in an era where AI can outpace and possibly soon, out-quality a professional, "The work you do on _you_ can be _the art_."

Could you elaborate on this? Is it just a claim, or is there some consensus out there based on something that it doesn't/shouldn't apply?

Going into the vault!

When you spend Canadian dollars at a business owned by a Canadian, you're sending that owner and the Canadian government your money, in exchange for their goods or services, normally at a surplus of value for them. You are 'helping' them; you are 'investing' in the Canadian economy. You are justifying the existence of their business and the jobs of the people who work there.

Especially insofar as you're making this choice versus American options, you are putting money into the hands of Canadians rather than Americans. This is the underlying concept behind boycotts and voting with your dollars or feet.

You or a business with legal owners can have a bank account, and you can give access to that account to an agent, but real banks work in the real world, and "know your customer" regulations need a real person somewhere in the chain.

But, hey, maybe I'm wrong.

My Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people.

Vibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a "working product", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time.

Will everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money.

It used recent APIs and patterns that I didn't have to go read extensive docs for or do deep learning on. It has an acceptable test suite. The code was easy to read, and reasonable, and I know no one will ever flip it into ad-serving malware by surprise.

A big thing is just that the idea of creating a non-trivial tool is suddenly a valid answer to the question. Previously, I know would have had to spend a bunch of time reading docs, finding examples, etc., let alone the inevitable farting around with a minor side-quest because something wasn't working, or rethinking+reworking some design decision that on the whole wasn't that important. Instead, something popped into existence, mostly worked, and I could review and tweak it.

It's a little bit like jumping from a problem of "solve a polynomial" to one of "verify a solution for a polynomial".

We should have started arguing when he just said he had a gun, indoors, in the crowd. We shouldn't have quietly walked outside at his demand. But that all happened. Here we are now, at the car, and he's got the gun out, and he's saying "get in", and we're probably not going to win from here -- but pal, it's time to start arguing. Or better yet, fighting back hard.

Because that car isn't going anywhere we want to be. We absolutely can not get in the car right now, and just plan to argue the point later. It doesn't matter how right the argument is at all.

In my note about misreading the suggestion, I was thinking generally. I do believe that there is no reason from a PCI perspective why a given production system cannot process a transaction live and also in a dry mode on a new code path that's being verified, but if the difference isn't just code paths on a device, and instead involves hardware and process changes, your point about needing to deploy a dev box and that being a PCI issue totally makes sense, plus the bit about it being a bad test anyway because of the differences in actions taken or outputs.

The example you gave originally, of shipping to the lower stake exceptional stores first and then working out issues with them before you tried to scale out to everywhere, sounded to me like a very solid approach to mitigating risk while shipping early.

My point above was that it's not necessarily easy to convince the operators of a business that it's a justifiable engineering expense to set up a new "prodlike but with anonymized data" environment from scratch, because it's not a trivial thing to make and maintain.

I do think it's pretty easy to convince operators of a business to adopt the other strategy suggested in a sibling thread: run a dry mode parallel code path, verify its results, and cut over when you have confidence. This shouldn't really be an alternative to a test environment, but they can both achieve similar stuff.

This is a misreading of the suggestion, I think. My reading of the suggestion is to run a production "dry run" parallel code path, which you can reconcile with the existing system's work for a period of time, before you cut over.

This is not an issue precluded by PCI; it is exactly the method a team I led used to verify a rewrite of and migration to a "new system" handling over a billion dollars of recurring billing transactions annually: write the new thing with all your normal testing etc, then deploy it alongside in a "just tell us what you would do" mode, then verify its operation for specific case classes and then roll progressively over to using it for real.

edit: I don't mean to suggest this is a trivial thing to do, especially in the context you mentioned with many elements of hardware and likely odd deployment of updates, etc.

Dev: "Could we pull an export of relevant historical data and get some time to write code to safely anonymize that, and stand up a parallel production system using just the anonymized data and replicate our deploy there, so we can safely test on real-ish stuff at scale?"

Lead: "I'll think about it. In the meantime, please just build the features I asked you to. We gotta hustle on this one."

I'm not arguing with this hypothetical exchange that it's infeasible or even a bad idea to do exactly what you suggested, but attempting to justify an upfront engineering cost that isn't directly finishing the job is a difficult thing to win in most contexts.

Was Helen Keller conscious? Did she only gain that when she was finally taught to communicate? Built like a human, but she couldn't say it, so...

Clearly she was. So there are entities built like us which may not be able to communicate their consciousness and we should, for ethical reasons, try to identify them.

But what about things not built like us?

Your superconductivity point seems to go in this direction, but you don't seem to acknowledge it: something might achieve a form of consciousness very similar to what we've got going on, but maybe it's built differently. If something tells us it's conscious but it's built differently, do we just trust that? Because some LLMs already may say they're conscious, so...

Pretty likely they aren't at present conscious. So we have an issue here.

Then we have to ask about things which operate differently and which also can't tell us. What about the cephalopods? What about cows and cats? How sure are we on any of these?

Then we have to grapple with the flight analogy: airplanes and birds both fly but they don't at all fly in the same way. Airplane flight is a way more powerful kind of flight in certain respects. But a bird might look at a plane and think "no flapping, no feathers, requires a long takeoff and landing: not real flying" -- so it's flying, but it's also entirely different, almost unrecognizable.

We might encounter or create something which is a kind of conscious we do not recognize today, because it might be very very different from how we think, but it may still be a fully legitimate, even a more powerful kind of sentience. Consider human civilization: is the mass organism in any sense "conscious"? Is it more, less, the same as, or unquantifiably different than an individual's consciousness?

So, when you say "there is nothing more to it, it's pretty much that basic and simple," respectfully, you have simply missed nearly the entire picture and all of the interesting parts.