The author is blocking UK ip addresses, presumably out of principle rather than because they’d fall foul of it.

If I'm eating a sausage, I like to be certain that no asbestos was used in its production.

This is a ridiculous analogy. Test the app. Read its source code. Developers could always write toxic instruction in your tools. AI may write inefficient or messy code, but it’s far from nefarious. “Asbestos” code is written intentionally by humans, not unintentionally AI.

That's a good way to guarantee nobody will use it. Who is going to test the app in a sandbox with godknowswhat kind of tooling needed to find malicious behavior and read the code? For a tool that's convenient once per decade?

At no point ever in history could you guarantee that third party code downloaded from the internet was not malicious without some sort of security review.

Software security assessments exist for this very purpose. You may personally lack the rigor to do this at home but those who have rigorous security processes absolutely do implement security reviews.

There is a whole industry of professionals who do this work.

Nobody, and that's my point. 99% of people going to install the tool and never bother with the source. This was true before AI and is still true now.

Aptly, given Elon's ancestry, did the whole anti-apartheid movement simply pass you by?

Or, you know, just write it yourself.

The references are almost irrelevant. The banks + fintechs have far more depth than that.

How do you know that the explanations are free from error?

You can still learn from sources that have errors. Many textbooks have mistakes and false information in them, but that didn't stop them from providing educational value to people.

We're talking about LLM's that are designed to be confidently incorrect. Accuracy is a side-effect.

When textbooks are incorrect it is also with great confidence. If you can't spot logical inconsistencies in the material were you actually learning or merely memorizing?

Critical thinking

The EU does not write traffic legislation, it leaves that up to the individual states.

Unlike the US, the EU is a collection of fully sovereign countries.

This was a mental shortcut, to exemplify EU vs US attitude in this case. I am from and live in one of EU countries, I am very well aware of that.

“fully” is optimistic - being a member of the EU means giving up some sovereignty.

No, because in a functioning legislature the offence would be something like 'failing to disclose details', in the same way that refusing to participate in a DUI breath/blood draw would be a discrete offence.

The UK driving licence authority (DVLA) also has a period in which you can’t conduct a range of transactions overnight, but that’s because it interfaces with systems that still run batch jobs overnight and the cost of making it all 24/7 simply wasn’t worth it considering the demand.

Really having common maintenance windows makes things way easier. If you already have a service with a limited geographical range its not bad.

I mean one thing we have learnt from Epstein is that the 'elite' don't spend much time crafting the perfect email!

Very true, and it's not just creepy elites either. Before I got into tech I worked a blue collar job that involved zero emailing. When I first started office work I was so incredibly nervous about how to write emails and would agonize over trivial details. Turns out just being clear and concise is all most people care about.

There might be other professions where people get more hung up on formalities but my partner works in a non-tech field and it's the same way there. She's far more likely to get an email dashed off with a sentence fragment or two than a long formal message. She has learned that short emails are more likely to be read and acted on as well.