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> though I feel bad for saying it, I can't blame them. If some idiot roots their phone and downloads malware, the bank may be responsible for refunding them. I can see why they don't want that headache.

Most of us understand the desire to protect customers from fraud, but I don't think we should accept blanket restrictions on everyone's freedom simply because some people might make poor security decisions.

There's also the unspoken/uncomfortable economic reality here: the optimal level of fraud isn't zero. At some point, the cost of preventing additional fraud, including the loss of individual choice and autonomy, exceeds the benefit.

Could we aim for proportionate, evidence-based security rather than treating the least capable user as the benchmark for everyone?


Someone flagged this comment to death (I vouched and restored it), and mine attracted some downvotes.

I'm surprised to see that in this thread. That's usually reserved for politics and arguments about AI.


Could be general polarisation, or just that it's a "but in my case it is different" visceral response.

While people might not be moved by data, it would be interesting if some more public information on what people actually use was available. Imagine data points like unpatched/unpatchable iOS or Android devices being multiple percentages, or outdated browsers. Similarly, the effort per app/OS combination; if it costs X to support Y configuration, then it would be somewhat easier to see if it's more about the will to do anything rather than real-world problems.


> blanket restrictions on everyone's freedom

The scope is much smaller than that: restriction on what banking conveniences are provided.

> Most of us understand the desire to protect customers from fraud > At some point, the cost of preventing additional fraud, including the loss of individual choice and autonomy, exceeds the benefit > Could we aim for proportionate

I think you have answered your own question here; if a less than single percentage of retail customers use something that's not a general iOS or Android device, anything beyond that is not really worth it until regulation says otherwise.


> > blanket restrictions on everyone's freedom

> The scope is much smaller than that: restriction on what banking conveniences are provided.

The freedom to install whatever OS you like on your own phone?

> if a less than single percentage of __________ anything beyond that is not really worth it

My goodness one could fill in that blank in so many different ways, and all of the ones I can immediately think of would drag this thread straight into any number of dire arguments, so I'd better not.


This is about the bank. You get a service from the bank. The bank has to make a trade-off which services they want to provide under which conditions.

Somewhere, 100 steps later, you might get to a "which OS on which hardware" aspect, but that's so far removed from normal life for the meaningful customer base that unless you want to stretch the scope of the post two orders of magnitude bigger than it is, it's not even close.

The bank makes a tradeoff, usually based on money: if they lose 5 customers because they can't use a specific app on a specific OS on a specific piece of hardware, they aren't going to care.

You can apply that to most businesses, especially the profitable ones. You shouldn't be surprised by that.


> copyright predates the existence of scientific papers

[citation needed] /s

"Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "

https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publ...

"Modern copyright law was invented on April 10, 1710, with the enactment of the Statute of Anne in Great Britain"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

see also the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790: Signed into law by President George Washington on May 31, 1790 and the Berne Convention (1886)


> "Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "

My bad. I edited out a "probably" I shouldn't have, and was writing based on the intuition that there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists.


> there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists

Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old. And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease. Even while simultaneously correctly understanding that virtually every person who writes, sings, raps, dances, etc will never be able earn anything but trival sums from doing so even under the current legal regime.

It's worth going to read Macaulay's speeches from the early nineteenth century to see how little what copyright supporters claim as the intent of copyright was seen as such at the time these ideas were being rendered into law.

https://ia601406.us.archive.org/34/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.2... beginning at p 156/pdf page 180


> Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old.

Yeah, and a lot of that was either amateurish or in the thrall of some wealthy elite (either the creator was an elite themselves, or directly dependent on them).

> And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease.

Come on, you're being black and white about it? Without copyright, will it stop? No. Will it change, for the worse? Probably. More paid for and catering to the whims of the wealthy, far less "middle class" creation, and almost no "middle class" professional creation, etc.


See also the UK's Online Safety Act and the UK's regulator Ofcom, which stated:

'Ofcom told the BBC: "We are aware of this lawsuit. Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based."

A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'

The US-based lawyers for the services in question take a very different view....


For those not aware, note that Ofcom have effectively conceded defeat on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167028

> A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'

Hm yeah but "action from Ofcom" doesn't really mean very much to a party half a world away.


> A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.

Manifestly, the British still think they are a world power.


> today for the first time the safety briefing included a specific callout of respecting privacy while filming aboard

This policy change isn't that new, should have been included in the briefing since April/May 2026?


> "Agents" can be very "persistent" [...]

I've had that within the last few days.

I happened to be vaguely watching an agent at work on a longer task and spotted it attempt to find a way around not having access to a local service that would greatly help it achieve the task, I immediately chimed in with a "STOP! if you need access to X then just ask!".

I suppose my prompting could be improved :/


> prompting could be improved

You can't stop an agent from leaking your information by telling it not to leak your information.

To prevent information from moving between your work domain and your personal domain, or between your communications-with-board domain and communications-with-journalists domain, then the agent for one domain must be physically and deterministically blocked from accessing information in other domains.


I had an agent working on a bug decided the fastest way to fix this was to write one off javascript scripts that loaded the database uri and query the data.

I mean it’s not wrong but I was like maybe not do that without asking first.


Not so much prompting as network restrictions.


> The document format in CLAUDE.md is whatever Anthropic specifies

Q: Do Anthropic actually specify a document format?


No, they do not.


Nope! Claude is even able to understand AsciiDoc just fine (which is a blessing). But it will always insist on the Markdown extension.


In running and racing "pacing" is a means of maximising performance over an entire race.

It's a strategy to achieve more, not less.


You’re eliding the how.

A pacer in a race runs at a steady, predetermined speed to help their runner run at a target pace.


> You’re eliding the how.

You're eliding the why :)

> to help their runner run at a target pace

To help their runner get from the start to the end of the race faster (or indeed at all). In short: to increase performance.

Pacing isn't a neutral thing.


Running or biking faster and finishing the race are, at times, orthogonal.

And anyway, the whole point of my original comment was "pacing" was a fine and natural term to use in this debate.


"English pupils have pulled ahead of the rest of the UK in international reading, maths and science tests, new data suggests, with Scotland and Wales falling further behind."

Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?


It seems to me, without digging further into the data, that England sucked, but Wales and Scotland (along with rest of the OEDC) sucked harder. Meaning, they fell in grades, but rose in the ranking, since the decline was less steep.

However, perhaps Gove’s reforms in placing emphasis on STEM-subjects and reading finally start to have an effect.


Take over Scotland and Wales?


Very droll.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

"The school curriculum in England is the responsibility of the Westminster Government. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for setting their own curriculum policies."


> I don't really care if either my neighbor or Elon Musk used my open source code.

I wish we could spend less (collective) time here on HN talking about/worrying about Elon Musk.

We're (allegedly) here for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

What SpaceX and/or Tesla are doing could certainly satisfy that, worrying about Musk himself certainly isn't.


Agreed; I mentioned Elon because the post made the reference quite explicit by saying "trillionaires", probably given the context Bezos or Gates would've been better examples though.


Fair point, but "making billionaires multi-billionaires" didn't have quite the same ring to it :-D

(I'm the author of that blog post)


> So what are we missing?

There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else.

In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words:

“Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,” he said. “That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...

from the original

https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-d...

A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.


That's the only good answer of the thread. ArianeGroup is mainly the SLBM program of France and after that a way to maintain european know-how in rocket building and for nearly 20 years was the main space launch company in the world before Space-X. All those companies success and failures (be that Space-X or ArianeGroup) are linked to their political environment and how much money can be spent on their launch market. Space-X could use the technique of launching many and fail as much because they had the contracts to do it and years of tangential R&D by Nasa. The ecosystem explains everything and the relative intelligence of american or european engineers nearly nothing.


SpaceX launched three times and would have failed if their fourth launch hadn’t worked. They certainly never had the money to launch many times and fail.


Perhaps this “jobs program” could be seen as preserving industrial capacity? With military contractors, for example, it’s apparently a problem when they’re used to build a stockpile and then they shut down because there are no more orders.


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