forcing the OS to authenticate the age of the person using the machine? age verification can easily be done by using the DMV as a conduit or using login.gov as a conduit or using id.me as a conduit. these interfaces are already used by dozens of government agencies to authenticate citizens of the United States, and there doesn't need to be any special software installed on the machine
i dont know, i'm in my 50's, and been doing software engineering work every day professionally since i was 15, and i can say claude code (max) has made me at least 20x more productive... Its definitely an improvement. I think what they've got is top notch, doesnt come close to what the competition are offering, at this point.
I tried to use Google's Gemini CLI from the command line on linux and I think it let me type in two sentences and then it told me that I was out of credits... and then I started reading comments that it would overwrite files destructively [0] or worse just try to rewrite an entire existing codebase [1]. it just doesn't sound ready for prime time. I think they wanted to push something out to compete with Claude code but it's just really really bad.
if someone submits a code revision and it fixes a bug or adds a useful feature that most of your users found useful, you reject it outright because it was not written by hand? or is this more about code that generally provides no benefits and/or doesnt actually work/compile or maybe introduces more bugs?
If you know what you're doing, you can achieve good results with more or less any tool, including a properly-wielded coding agent. The problem is people who _don't_ know what they're doing.
> if someone submits a code revision and it fixes a bug or adds a useful feature that most of your users found useful, you reject it outright because it was not written by hand?
If they didn't read it, then neither will I, otherwise we have this weird arms race where you submit 200 PRs per day to 200 different projects, wasting 1hr of each project, 200 hrs total, while incurring only 8hrs of your time.
If your PR took less time to create and submit than it takes the maintainer to read, then you didn't read your own PR!
Your PR time is writing time + reading time. The maintainer time is reading time only, albeit more carefully.
The way that it would make sense for age verification is if there was some federal system that verifies your identity and then it would use a public key crypto system to allow a third party to check whether or not this person is over the age or not.... common systems I see being used right now that could be integrated for this purpose would be login.gov or id.me... they could allow a token-based authentication system for verification of age without having to divulge any other information about the person. these systems are already being used by the IRS, VA, SSA and other Federal systems.
Google has zero customer service. using them for anything serious makes no business sense. the only thing that they're good for is serving ads to people, and they have a support team for that, but only if you're spending a lot of money, and even then good luck finding it
yeah exactly have you ever tried to call Google support? it doesn't exist. the only way to contact Google is by posting something on news.ycombinator.com and then hoping that some person who works at that company actually responds to you and logs in somewhere and then changes your access.
this is the long-standing problem with using Google services. either they become deprecated and removed without notification, or they outright ban you for using tools as intended. either way, using Google tools for anything doesn't make business sense to anybody who's seen the history of this.
the government should not be using any private LLM, they should build their own internal systems using publicly available LLM's, which change frequently anyway. I don't see why they would put their trust in a third party like that. This back and forth about "ethics" is a bunch of nonsense, and can be solved simply by going for a custom solution which would probably be orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run. The most expensive part is the GPU's used for inference, which can be produced in silicon [1].
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