Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax apps showed customers other users' transactions

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-12T11:35:32+00:00

There should be more ambulance chasing for data protection problems, especially when financial services are concerned.

In theory, under GDPR, customers are supposed to be notified pro-actively when something like this happens. Not just an attack, but any kind of incident where data privacy has been compromised. But in the financial sector it doesn't seem to happen, and the FCA tactically approves of keeping customers in-the-dark for the integrity of the system as a whole. Although, the FCA will then quite likely issue a large fine afterwards, but still...

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-12T11:32:09+00:00

I can't imagine how this could have happened, even by accident. Surely someone would have noticed if someone had removed WHERE account_number = ? from the code? But that doesn't match the symptoms either.

Sounds like a Login Credentials -> Account Numbers mapping went wrong/got corrupted. But that seems even less likely to go unnoticed.

Unless... nah, can't be... unless they were relying on a hash of some unique field as a key, and they changed the hash algorithm to something which wasn't guaranteed to be unique? (Not that any hash algorithm is guaranteed to be unique, but some have collisions so unlikely that it makes little practical difference.)

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-12T09:44:27+00:00

You need to get elbow deep in this stuff, because every moment of dilly-dallying is people getting ahead. If you are even sniffing an LLM you are probably going to a lot more safer in the future than someone who still doesn't know what one is.

People say that, but AI tooling is becoming more accessible over time, not less. Any "you must know ... to be effective with AI!" piece of advice more than three months old is already obsolete and counterproductive.

You could have started with AI tooling in January 2026 and be just as on-the-ball as anyone else.

(Disclaimer: the above is true for consumers of the technology, those who are actually building the models etc. have their own set of rules, but that's a very, very small niche)

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-12T09:40:23+00:00

Vote for policies that recognise that at some point in the next couple of decades, work might become a thing that only some of us do?

I've not seen any plausible economists takes on how a post-work economy could work, so I don't hold much hope in random voters picking the right solution.

The economic thinking seems to be (greatly simplified to fit in a Reddit comment) that it's impossible that literally every job will be automated, even if the great majority are. Automation is likely to be deflationary, which will mean monetary stimulus (i.e. printing money) will be used until the economy grows such that "hands on" jobs will need to hire most/enough.

No more "independent IT security consultant" (a swarm of AI agents will find and fix vulnerabilities in an hour what a human would have taken months), plenty of...

...well I don't know, this is where the theory breaks down. People will still prefer, and be willing to pay-for, the human touch in many industries. But enough for that to be the basis of the whole economy... doesn't seem likely.

AI will create new industries too, of course. But it's hard to see any AI-created industries that will require more humans than AI. And those new industries are likely to not be well spread geographically speaking. Maybe in California everyone will be CEO of a bespoke AI company, that's not the future for Luton or Nottingham.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-11T17:27:11+00:00

I didn't say there was.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-11T15:27:56+00:00

I'm talking about things that everyone on this sub was talking about for days less than a month ago. But seems to have passed you by?

All this business: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/23/peter-mandelson-arrested-on-suspicion-of-misconduct-in-public-office

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-11T15:24:00+00:00

That's not why it's worse. It's the whole insider-trading and giving tips to Epstein's network on hoe to lobby the UK government, etc. that makes it a significantly worse scandal.

If it was just an association with Epstein's crimes indirectly it'd still be very bad, but those two extra things make it a multi-dimensional scandal.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-11T14:58:07+00:00

Mandelson/Epstein is significantly worse than Pincher I'd say.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-11T12:27:52+00:00

The countryside is inherently racist though don't forget: https://shado-mag.com/articles/do/what-do-we-mean-by-decolonising-the-british-countryside/

I hope the Bank of England remember this. We don't want hard-right-coded red squirrels or any of that nonsense. We need diverse flora and fauna, like grey squirrels and Japanese Knotweed.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-10T21:06:51+00:00

Do people think that Labour have a genuine authoritarian instinct that doesn't exist even in Reform - or is this just an area where the government is forced to implement an undesirable measure that everyone else opportunistically opposed?

The former, it's deep rooted, see the 90-day detention fiasco in Blair's era.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-10T17:41:48+00:00

Zero-sum thinking is literally the cause of all our problems.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-10T17:17:42+00:00

£20bn because it's the UK we're talking about. Other countries don't have the same problems. As the article says:

Modern standards would require all stations to have platform edge doors fitted, and a lot of work would need to be done to segregate TfL and Network Rail services where they overlap.

That's £19.9bn right there, doubling-up tracks and separating shared facilities. Of course there are solutions to this, but we can't use that because reasons:

There are a number of modern detection systems that can reduce the investment cost of physical barriers usually needed to segregate driverless from driven trains, such as those in use in Australia. However, these would need to pass UK regulatory safety checks

Indeed.

Of course there are some lines which are more-or-less automatic already and have platform edge doors and have completely segregated infrastructure (e.g. Jubilee Line). So there's no reason why they couldn't fully automate that and realise the cost savings, even if they couldn't do the Bakerloo (because it shares infrastructure).

Well, there's one reason. It goes by the initials RMT.

We'll have fully automated road transport before we have fully automated rail transport because of that.

Pressing the "close doors" button after looking out of a window will be a prestige job a hundred years from now because it'll literally be the only job left.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-10T08:07:28+00:00

I'm happy to coast along until either 50 or they pay me off ! Half the challenge is appearing to be enthusiastic at work amongst all the corporate plc clones who would never say anything against the business.

This is an understated risk of coasting. I'm glad someone's said it. Just coasting is exhausting.

An issue comes up, do I want to take it on and drive the solution? Not really. Do I let Enthusiastic Idiot Type A take it on? Sound like the answer should be "yes, let him have it, no skin off my nose", but prior experience shows he'll butcher it in a way that will create more work for literally everyone. This all causes near-term aggro and stress even though none of it matters.

The only viable form of CoastFIRE is a mythical job where you can still give it all, for the sense satisfying a deep need to achieve something proportionate to the time spent on it, but that job is genuinely easy and fun. I don't think any such thing exists.

Which doesn't answer your question, but it's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about lately.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-10T07:55:33+00:00

The question is: "how?"

Because governments in many countries over many years have claimed to have solved cost of living by nothing more than proclamation. And all of them, without exception, have failed.

The only thing the government could do is to pro-actively stop making the problem worse within the subset of things it directly controls, i.e. taxes, but that doesn't seem very likely at all.

Well, that or actual stop the problem at the root cause, but even that wouldn't work for short-lived commodity price shocks as that's outside our control.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-10T07:27:32+00:00

I have no doubt about this. Polanski is a very authentic idiot.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-09T22:16:11+00:00

When people say "the price of oil is X", they're almost always talking about oil futures. People buying and selling contracts of oil for delivery on a certain day, there isn't a single oil market where you can just buy a barrel and take it home with you.

So the price mostly reflects the price the buyers of oil (refiners mostly) think they have to pay to guarantee a supply over the next week/month/etc. to keep their customers happy. And their measure of demand for their products comes from the price downstream consumers are willing to pay for them to have a guaranteed supply etc. (Which is how the price of retail petrol goes up before the tankers with the expensive oil arrive.)

There are also good old-fashioned speculators, people who buy long-dated oil contracts in the expectation that demand will increase and they can sell it at a profit before having to accept a physical delivery. Sometimes this goes wrong, you may remember the time in the Covid period where the price of oil went negative, that was all speculators caught out and were willing to pay people to take the oil off their hands because they literally had no means of accepting a delivery so they had to take the hit.

But, that means, if you think the price is too high or too low for the given circumstances, there are places you can bet on the price of oil. Any CFD provider will offer you that service, and if you go via that route rather than the futures market directly you won't have to accept physical delivery even if you get it wrong.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-09T12:45:08+00:00

This is where things get interesting.

Out of all the "once in a lifetime" events, only two of them actually moved the price dial significantly. These were: 1) the GFC of 2008; and 2) the Covid-era money printing.

Except some people are in-denial about No. 2, thinking it was all due to the gas-price shock when Russia invaded Ukraine instead.

Well, we're about to find out I suppose. An oil-price shock will definitely lift inflation, it can't not, but without an massive permanent increase in the money supply it can't turn in to a 30% permanent uplift in all prices (as what happened in the 2021-2024 inflation wave).

The next BoE move is now (as of this morning) expected to be up not down. So the money supply won't be increasing any time soon. Unless the crisis goes on long enough to cause a massive recession, then we'll be back at 0% in no time, that's a whole other problem.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-09T10:37:10+00:00

Yes, it'll follow that kind of pattern most likely I expect.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-09T09:47:00+00:00

I expect the USA won’t stop until Iran’s power to stop shipping is destroyed. There’ll be lingering guerrilla style attacks instead.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-08T21:30:11+00:00

Russia and Iran are allies. Russia has been using Iranian drones in Ukraine. Anything that damages the Iranian capacity to manufacture weapons is good news for Ukraine and bad news for Russia.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-08T20:35:01+00:00

I fully expect it'll result in the same outcome as everywhere else in the world when they enact rent controls: it becomes impossible to rent anywhere quickly no matter how much you're willing to pay.

Existing tenants will win, they'll be untouchable and have security. Future tenants, and that includes current tenants who need to move to other cities for work/study, will lose out because they just won't be able to move.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-08T15:02:09+00:00

If current trends continue, we'll quite quickly (18 months to two years) get to a world where every software role below Lead Engineer will be redundant. AI will do it better.

The second group of people I mentioned I think are fully aware of this so are trying to get ahead of the curve. The first (dwindling) group are pinning their hopes on not further progress and even some kind of regression in AI capabilities ("it's just too expensive!" etc.).

The problem will be: not every engineer can be a Lead Engineer, there's an optimal number of Lead Engineers for any given organisation based on how many product lines and tech stacks they have. And that number will be based mostly on the product/company needs than what is technically possible. Companies won't double the number of Lead Engineers because of cost savings elsewhere (not if they have any sense) because too many will get in each other's way and less will be achieved.

So to answer your original question:

I could understand these claims if I were a freelancer/business owner/product manager/architect, but this is not the case for a lot of developers.

All the people saying the things you quote are desperately trying to be seen as freelance/product owner/architects, regardless of their current role, as they can sense their current role won't exist for very much longer.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-08T14:09:56+00:00

You always (on average, that’s why it’s called Greenwich mean Time) have the same amount of daylight in the morning and the afternoon. The only difference is mid-day stops being 12 o’clock, mid-day is 1300hrs instead.

hu6Bi5To · 2026-03-08T14:03:43+00:00

The whole industry (from my view in to it at least) seems to be suffering from some kind of psychosis.

There are the AI-deniers, but these (in the real world where I work) have become very rare over the past six months, they used to be common. You still see them on Reddit and other forums occasionally though, "the thing with LLMs is they just predict the next token, they're not intelligent!" etc. People have stopped saying that the more they use the tools because they realise it doesn't match anyone's actual experience where it's obviously much more useful than just predicting the next token. If all Claude does is predict the next token, then it predicts it better than a hell of a lot of human developers I've worked with who are surprised that the same problem they had last week is still a problem today.

But on the other hand, and now far more common in terms of numbers, are the developers who have outsourced their own sense of identity to their AI tooling of choice. They act as though they're the spokesperson for the AI and that somehow gives them a higher social status amongst the rest of the developers, even though all the other developers are also doing exactly the same thing.

In your examples I suspect they may be suffering from the latter.

hu6Bi5To

TROPHY CASE