Matt Lakeman's recent "Notes on Afghanistan" actually covers this as he first-hand experienced a similar situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban had shut off the internet:
"The internet was out. Everywhere. Across the entire country. No cell data, no wifi, no phone service, and as far as I could tell, there are no landlines in Afghanistan [...] But now the blackout was total. Our waiter was complaining to my guide that he couldn’t contact his mother in a western province. I saw other people in the crowded restaurant fiddling with their phones and looking annoyed. I asked my guide what he thought was going on. He shrugged."
"Without internet and phones, people can’t talk to loved ones, businesses can’t function, trade can’t function, and even government offices can’t function. Only the Taliban with their well-established network of short-wave radios can function. But still, if the internet remains off long enough in Afghanistan, the country’s economy and society may very well collapse. Afghans couldn’t get money from banks. Soon enough, would food stop being delivered to cities?"
Russia has been systematically shutting down the Internet for a long time now, to disrupt Ukrainian drones. The effects were very painful intially, especially re payment systems; people were encouraged to withdraw and carry cash. Now they are shifting more and more towards a "whitelisting" approach where a handful of services continue to function while everything else is turned off. As usual in Russia, people complain but adapt.
In recent years they have been trying to build a nation-wide Intranet that can function while international gateways are blocked. It is not perfect and every time they block the Internet, many issues happen but for the most port critical network services (such as payments) continue to function.
Seems like it would be an easy target for the government (or really anyone) to DOS, right? Presumably there's no good way for the nation-wide intranet to exclude government actors? I'm just thinking out loud; I'm glad to hear something is being done and I wish the Iranian people the best.
Correct. I'm more referring to the secondary discussions on HN/Bluesky which have trended the same lines as usual instead of highlighting the unique actions of Sage as Simon did.
I listened to bits of it and I was disappointed by the lack of push back from Lex who was supper excited because he got to hang out with Durov for a couple of weeks in Dubai - the tl;dr I got from what I heard is that Telegram is amazing and Durov is a visionary freedom fighter. Lex's recent history I'm not surprised though.
He claims: 'So, by the time the head of intelligence services met me to ask about Romania to help them silencing conservative voices in Romania, I was already wary of what can be going on next.'
I call bullshit on this. The 'conservative voices' are muppets doing Russia's bidding who broke all sorts of election laws. There was nothing serious happening on Telegram in Romania that would warrant any foreign intervention, it just doesn't make sense.
Speaking of agents and tests, here's a fun one I had the other day: while refactoring a large code base I told the agent to do something precise to a specific module, refactor with the new change, then ensure the tests are passing.
The test suite is slow and has many moving parts; the tests I asked it to run take ~5 minutes. The thing decided to kill the test run, then it made up another command it said was the 'tests' so when I looked at the agent console in the IDE everything seemed fine collapsed, i.e. 'Tests ran successfully'.
Obviously the code changes also had a subtle bug that I only saw when pushing its refactoring to CI (and more waiting). At least there were tests to catch the problem.
I think that it's something that model providers don't want to fix, because the amount of times that Claude Code just decided to delete tests that were not passing before I added a memory saying that it would need to ask for my permission to do that was staggering. It stopped happening after the memory, so I believe that it could be easily fixed by a system prompt.
Your point to not rely on good intentions and have systems in place to ensure quality is good - but your comparison to humans didn't go well with me.
Very few humans fill in their task with made up crap then lie about it - I haven't met any in person. And if I did, I wouldn't want to work with them, even if they work 24/7.
Obligatory disclaimer for future employers: I believe in AI, I use it, yada yada. The reason I'm commenting here is I don't believe we should normalise this standard of quality for production work.
I'm not sure if it's ridiculous if you factor in something like copilot. Heck, even just your IDE's built-in autocomplete (which only finishes the current variable name) can get close to being responsible for 20% of your code, with tools like copilot I think you can even more easily hit that target.
I will guess that you are generating orders of magnitude more lines of code with your software than people do when building projects with LLMs - if this is true I don't think the analogy holds.
Why does the title say 'in London'? Everything else I've read in the thread refers to Manchester.
I agree with other posters, unless there's a clear strategy to cash in on the equity, you can consider it (to put it nicely) a bet with bad odds. You say you're friends with the founders, that should decrease the chances of you getting screwed over but it's still a possibility. And that's in the unlikely scenario that you can cash in your shares.
A question for you - if you can get a job at a company with a higher total comp (RSUs, bonus etc), why don't you? If the answer is you haven't looked at this but would be willing, get an offer and come back with it to your founders. You can do that after they give you this current raise.
Also, beware, management is different from doing everything yourself :)
I live in South Manchester, role is technically in London. We don’t have a permanent office as the team are fairly remote. When we meet it’s in London and the team hire out some rooms/desks at a cowork. I occasionally travel down, 2-3 times a month for these meet days. Centre of gravity of employees and activity is London, but we have people flying in from Scotland and France too.
Thanks for the suggestions! I could definitely shop around. I don’t have time in this round of negotiations as need to give a counter offer next week. I also really enjoy working here, it’s a good set up.
Labour is worse if you look at the past years. They were pushing for harsher restrictions in the pandemic and they said this bill is 'watered down' by the conservatives.
That’s intentional, I think. An internal faction made false smears to get the progressives out of positions of influence so their right-wing faction (who are as conservative as any Tory) could take power.
Does everything stop or it's mostly business as usual minus some things?
I would imagine hospitals, tax offices etc need the internet to work?
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