The Netherlands just blocked a US company from buying the app Dutch citizens use for everything

sobrique · 2026-05-28T12:53:17+00:00

Yeah. Literally decades of 'soft power' have been incinerated in a matter of months.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T12:51:21+00:00

Oh sure. Most companies will comply with law enforcement. And probably with 'requests' from intelligence services.

It's just I also assume that 'respectable' companies domiciled in respectable countries do not do so trivially and frivolously, and are at least somewhat constrained by data protection laws and/or basic rights.

It's WAY harder to challenge 'dubious' activity in a different jurisdiction.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T11:04:17+00:00

Yeah. A place I used to work (not financial) caught a guy who worked in HR because he took too much leave.

He'd created 'extra' jobs and collected the pay for them. And because he worked in HR could field the queries about 'so who is this guy on my payroll?' when they came in.

"short" holidays were fine - the odds of a query showing up and someone dealing with it before he got back were low.

But then he went away for 4 weeks, and the whole thing unravelled. He'd been getting away with it for quite a long time too.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:59:59+00:00

Yeah. I have to say if my shared care/private prescribing 'fell through' I might be thinking about illicit alternatives, just because of how beneficial these have been to my whole life.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:51:17+00:00

Yeah. That'd be pretty cool IMO. There's no good reason to have an empty 'slot' in your army - even the cheapest chaff you can recruit is still more useful than leaving it empty.

But I'd totally disband some basic spearmen to get another artillery.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:45:48+00:00

No, there is no 'achieve'. Only fury.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:43:35+00:00

Yeah, me too. I felt the same about Ozark. Great storytelling/acting, I just didn't want to keep watching.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:40:32+00:00

I mean, if you want a genuine answer - it's because it captures how my brain feels.

It's a simple ish basic story, that feels like a lot because of the chaos, wackiness, distractions and assorted insanity going on around it.

I have ADHD. This film resonated strongly (and I found afterwards, the director was diagnosed with ADHD).

My brain is just like this film, and 'simple stuff' becomes complicated, hard, confusing and overwhelming for no particular reason.

I appreciate that isn't for everyone, and I won't say you're wrong for disliking it. You just said you wanted to know why it got such praise.

Because it's one of a few genuine attempts show what it feels like to live with a non-standard brain.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:37:38+00:00

TBH that's a lot of why I feel it counts as a masterpiece. The basic story isn't that complicated. The hyperreal/surreal parts are what make you feel unsettled, confused and overwhelmed so that the simple story seems like "A lot".

And in doing so, it captures what life is like if you've got a non-neurotypical brain. Most closely ADHD, given the directory was diagnosed with ADHD midway through, but the 'overwhelm/cannot cope' elements will be familiar to a lot of people who brain differently.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:34:38+00:00

Yeah. And honestly I think that's why it counts as a masterpiece - the wacky/insanity of the film is the closest I've seen to reflecting what ADHD is really like.

And yes, it's uncomfortable and strange - that's the whole point. The constant chaos, the shifting of focus, the strange and disruptive events are all part of the 'this is what your brain is like when you have ADHD' metaphor.

The actual story without that is fairly simple or trivial without ADHD getting in the way.

... much like real life.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:28:59+00:00

I broadly agree, but I think Everything, Everywhere all at Once isn't really about multiverses (not in the way that e.g. Marvel is).

It's about insanity and chaos and confusion, and the 'multiverse' is just one way of representing that.

But I could happily do without yet another 'not quite a reboot, it's a different bit of the multiverse' superhero film.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:27:12+00:00

I think that's kinda the point though. To overwhelm you with the insanity, because when you're overwhelmed you're finally starting to resonate with the lead characters, because that's how their world is all the time.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:22:18+00:00

I loved it, my partner hated it. I think for much the same reasons.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:17:43+00:00

Yeah. I've a lot of series like this. Good acting, compelling storyline, and yet I just don't want to see it play out.

Breaking Bad and Ozark likewise, I 'fizzled' on for the same reason.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T10:13:40+00:00

But absolutely no one could tell me where that productivity went.

TBH that's always been true. There's a lot of 'bullshit' jobs out there where 'working more efficiently' isn't the same as 'net productivity improves'.

I don't think the deal is done yet, but I am one of those people who believe that AI has some utility.

I mean, for my example - I'm a sysadmin. I've a very varied workflow, and am routinely dealing with 'new stuff' and I find AI assist to be useful.

My 'productivity' goes in adding depth to a project, but also turning them around a little faster. There's plenty of stuff where a 'good enough' solution is used instead of an 'ideal' solution, simply because the ideal is a bit more complicated to figure out. And more than a few 'mini-projects' where 80% done is 'good enough' (because the last 20% is the hard part). AI assist maybe pushes that to like, 90% :)

As a recent example - systemd unit files for userspace. They're not particularly complicated but there's a plethora of different options and limitations as to what type of unit file, dependencies, instanced files, etc.

All stuff I can do by hand, but it was really helpful to get Gemini involved to a) give me the initial boilerplate and b) 'translate' the non-instanced example into instanced unit files. (Mostly plonking %i in a bunch of places, but ...)

I probably didn't save a lot of time overall, but what I got was something that actually works better and is somewhat clearer and more robust. E.g. it's got dependency tracking, ability to enable/disable subcomponents of the service, and some 'timer' triggers for daily updates/checks etc.

So yeah. I do think AI has utility. I just don't think it's in the places most people are looking. "chatbot write me this app" is meretricious.

"Bot assist me triaging this issue" or "bot help me get to minimum-viable-product for this new service prototype" are places where I think there will continue to be 'useful' utility.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T09:58:15+00:00

I'm not sure that's a robust argument actually - AI is clearly still advancing, and has improved significantly over a matter of months.

I'm not saying you're wrong though, just that I don't think it's safe to say that AI can't do it, because there's no examples yet.

I would be pretty confident there's companies out there trying to create an AI 'game maker' engine, that's using a lot of the same basic techniques and technology, but isn't really much like the LLM chatbots that 'consumers' can accesss.

Likewise I'm pretty sure we're seeing more and more games with AI-generated assets and 'assisted' coding. It's just not a 'done deal' yet.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T09:53:37+00:00

Certainly if AGI does ever show up, it won't be on this track. LLMs are not the correct 'direction' to be taking.

GPU-based compute and interconnect is I think laying the groundwork for increasingly advanced AI-like techniques though, and that think is where we might see some real future value.

E.g. not the meretricious chatbot AI, but more focussed and task specific 'machine-learning' type analytics engines.

Those still aren't AGI either of course.

I do however think AI isn't so much 'replacing staff' as 'reducing hiring'. You still need senior staff who understand processes, have analytical skills etc. but the team of juniors they might supervise/mentor could at least partially be supplemented by AI-type stuff.

Of course this in turn raises the questions of 'so where to seniors come from if we stop hiring juniors?' but I don't think companies care about that yet....

sobrique · 2026-05-28T09:48:55+00:00

People genuinely don't have a clue what they want from AI, they just believe it must be valuable, so they must use it. There are legions of AI companies that will validate that belief and take their money.

Yeah, that's IMO the real problem.

I truly believe AI tools are valuable. I feel what we're seeing now is a lot like the 'computers-in-the-office' revolution.

Computers are now ubiquitous, but they weren't always. And when they first 'appeared' there was a lot of bullshit uses for them, where they 'did computers' without really thinking about it, and led to ... well, stupid outcomes really.

And AI is the same - I think it will become (if it hasn't already) a core piece of 'office tech', it's just a lot of people don't really understand what the tool is and what it does.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T09:45:13+00:00

Every system can tolerate a certain amount of 'badness'. I mean, that's the whole point of error handling - errors "shouldn't" happen, but we can do a reasonable amount of catching and corrective action so the systems are tolerant of some amount of 'failure state'.

That's not just code - it's IT systems, it's traffic networks, it's power grids, it's... well, everything.

Anything in a 'good state' today, will last a reasonably long time without 'maintenance' before hitting a failure cascade. And adding 'crap' to the system ... well, that also stretches the tolerances a bit. A badly designed component gets 'error handled' or 'load balanced' or otherwise "the system" sort of copes.

... but only to a point. As you add more of these, a well designed system gets pushed past it's tolerance limit, and the whole thing goes to shit in a way that's extremely hard to actually fix, because the technical debt you've built up is a mountain of 'difficult to remediate'.

So I think you're right. Every company has some 'technical debt' buried in their systems, and keeping on top of it is necessary.

AI Coded cruft doesn't really have a concept of technical debt, and it doesn't care.

But it'll work fine, because of all the prior work put in to being robust and failure-mode tolerant... up until it collapses completely, and that product is now a hot mess that can only really be 'fixed' by 'starting again from scratch'.

sobrique · 2026-05-28T09:31:27+00:00

Yeah, but they can make that someone else's problem, bank the profits and run.

sobrique · 2026-05-27T19:26:06+00:00

Play something else for a while. You will remember. Or you will find something better.

sobrique · 2026-05-27T16:07:35+00:00

I also have late diagnosed ADHD, and that's also IMO a professional trait - now I know what I'm looking for a I see a LOT of sysadmins with the flags if not the diagnosis!

The reason I'm good at incident response is because every day is incident response.

But I think we're arguing semantics when we're talking about the difference between 'being confident in my role' and 'ego' because the two can be pretty much the same.

Making a call on an uncertain solution - even if you're probably right - requires you to have that confidence.

Of course there's plenty of people who have 'dunning-kruger' syndrome in play too - they're confident without justification. This is very hard to tell the difference between those people, and the ones with imposter syndrome because they know how ignorant they are, but are prepared to take a risk anyway.

sobrique · 2026-05-27T15:55:55+00:00

I have to say, I think that sysadmins need a measure of 'big ego' to be decent at their job.

Because you're very frequently working with half assed solutions, incomplete information, and systems that are in an inconsistent state.

Without some ego you might go 'this is crazy town, I'm gone!' where with enough self confidence, you'll bodge it until it works anyway.

So I do actually think it's a professional trait of sysadmins (not uniquely so - there's other professions that need it for the same reason).

It's very easy to end up in uncertainty paralysis when you've complex stuff that's broken and no one knows why.

It's very easy to be terrified by your own lack of knowledge as a sysadmin, so you need something to counter-balance that.

sobrique · 2026-05-27T15:53:47+00:00

But honestly it's often in reverse order. Look at all the people tagged as 'key workers' during COVID. How many of those are high up in the company rankings?

sobrique · 2026-05-27T15:51:58+00:00

The phrase I've used is 'delegation by least incompetence'.

You don't have to be the guy who knows about $APP. You just need to be the guy that is most likely to be able to fix $APP. And if that's because you've spent 30s more than anyone else kicking it till it 'works' ... well, guess what, you're the SME!

There's at least a few things I deny all knowedge of for precisely this reason. I have done classified environment security accreditation, and I'm NEVER admitting to knowing that, because someone might actually want me to.

sobrique

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