It is a lot easier to celebrate a turn towards dictatorship when you are untethered to historical knowledge. No amount of centralized power delivers a society with true personal freedom in the long run. History shows that even when dictatorships perform 'well' on some factors, especially in the short term, they send people into a freedom-robbing labyrinth. Do you care about personal liberty? Because in the long run with dictatorships you will lose on having a society that supports freedom, personal rights and liberties and decentralization of knowledge and innovation. Because dictatorships concentrate power without balance. Over time as inequalities & unfairness become severe... the rule gets more brittle. And dictators have to give more favors to the people that help them stay in power. Like economic favors. People with ambition then need to play into the system and help prop up the dictator if they want to keep their resources. Even then they are vulnerable to having everything taken. And for anyone that dares point out increasingly obvious flaws? Well, most dictatorships invariably slide into repression. People with new, better ideas that also happen to challenge the dictators entrenched interests? Or those of the dictators necessary economic allies? Family members? Point out corruption? Co-opted or cut down. Fueled by massive surveillance. And the threat of violence. Because self-censorship scales better than physical coercion on each person. People see opportunity for personal advantage. Some become informers. Some delight in the cruelty of seeing people they dislike arbitrarily punished. And when the strong leader dies? The society can be incredibly unstable as it carries the weight of so many injustices, so many lies. And for the system to persist? More repression needed.

thoughtful observations, appreciate you sharing.

Vibecoding is super interesting. And powerful. Coding syntax is getting better. But secure coding isn't keeping pace. In a test of 100 coding models, 45% of them introduced a serious vulnerability. For example, in 86% of tests, code wasn't secured against Cross-Site Scripting. NOW-TERM IMPLICATIONS This has big implications. Sure, there are the YOLOcoders that ship whole vibecoded apps without thinking about security. Or code review. Some percentage of their users will get rekt. If those projects get near high risk users, they are sprinkling knives in the weeds with potential for harm. BUT BIGGER MODELS = BETTER? Interestingly, even big fat models aren't massively better with security. S'EVERYWHERE My other worry? Vibecoding without security check steps is happening in existing projects / platforms etc. Even when people say they are coding. Sometimes they be vibecoding. This sort of thing has already come to tools you use, including to handle your funds & privacy. Sure secure code writing & review has never been anything near universal, but the scale and speed of new code creation that #vibecoding enables is new. VULNERABILITY DISCOVERY...ALSO ACCELERATING ICYMI, vulnerability DISCOVERY is also accelerating a lot faster than secure code creation... Whole industries are spinning up, including lots of offensive projects. ME? I #VIBECODE I love the change in how I create with code. But I think we are in for some really rough times, and the least informed parties are gonna be users. As ever. In the longer run this problem space also seems to offer paths for AI-driven improvement in secure code creation. But since not everything is accelerating at the same pace, the deltas = harm. Sauce: https://www.veracode.com/blog/genai-code-security-report/

The EU's Digital Identity Wallet project has a lot of big icks. Looking at the GitHub for the android Age Verification application feels like chewing rocks. Like the proprietary attestation baked into a must-use form of identification is absolutely the wrong path... And while we're at it, recall the rule of thumb: Age Verification either by deliberate or convenient naïveté is almost always a surveillance trojan horse. Source: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui

Proton #VPN signups spike1,400% as the UK Online Safety Act rolls out. Proton says spike is sustained & higher than when France blocked adult content. Source: https://archive.ph/i2d9W

Tea enforced ID & selfie collection. And doxxed their own users. In other news, the UK Online Safety Act is forcing websites to begin collecting IDs. This will end, predictably in fresh breaches. And more harm to users.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. -Attributed to Camus

The bones of this are already in place. And if you look at the EU & beyond you see a super-intense push for Age Verification... which is always the leading wedge. No accident that many of the countries pushing for this are also the biggest hitters in signals intelligence & monitoring... ...With the worst norms for personal privacy and freedoms.

Objectively, a terrible hammer. But a reminder that we still are in the earliest days of GenAI touching various fields. Like CAD. Wehere I think the impact of GenAI will be enormous. Natural place for it. So many human hours spent creating extremely simple repetitive things with slight variations. Checking in on the incumbent Autodesk..and looks like they are incorporating AI in assistant / #ML ways. Looks Interesting. Conservative. Very incremental. Makes sense given their codebase & users. Lots of inertia there too so I wonder what they have in the pipe? And how they will handle the upstarts going hard on generative model / asset creation. https://www.engineering.com/autocad-2025-adds-ai-features/

Your honor, in my defense I was being extremely productive at the time of the crash.