This was kind of infuriating about high school chemistry. We were taught so much simply is and that's that. Gold and Mercury differ by one proton, so why is one a dense, yellowish metal and the other one liquid at room temperature? Carbon and Nitrogen sit right next to each other on the periodic table, so why are their chemical properties so different? Why are there so few elements that are ferromagnetic? We dove relatively deep into chemical bonds and isotopes, but glossed over fundamental things like why compounds with similar structures had seemingly random, unrelated properties.
> What I am not understanding is the case of why, why would dutch government or website do this, is it out of honest mistake/(incompetence?) or malice.
When it comes to companies' wrongdoing, I'm starting to not care whether it's incompetence or malice anymore. When money and/or lives are at stake, incompetence is shaped like malice. We need to have a new word for this kind of "deliberate stupidity" and punish it just like we punish intent to do wrong.
I guess it didn't help enough to stop them from doing it in the first place--it just helped them stop once they were caught. Sure, it's a step up from other places where there is literally no consequence for this kind of sharing.
This is a business mindset, though. AI is great if you care about "delivering" stuff and "velocity" and you don't care what that stuff looks like. I got into computer programming because I like to program computers, not whatever this is. So glad I changed roles away from software development and only do programming at home as a hobby.
Woodworkers and furniture factories live happily side by side.
The unfortunate fact is that your boss or your customers never cared what your code looked like. They just cared that it worked bug free.
The craft will live on, no doubt, but the fact is that we're in the age of industrial programming.
Spending too much time twiddling line spacing, abstraction names, and dialing everything in just so is now for fun and not for profit.
Although to be honest, AI enables you to do that at scale too. It's never been easier to rename or refactor tens of thousands of lines to your hearts content. Even twiddling is accelerated.
Companies (and countries) learned a hundred years ago that everything you own, all your assets, are actually liabilities. The more you own the more difficult it is to run your business or country. This isn’t the age of industrialism in programming, or maybe it is and we’ll very quickly learn that you don't want to be generating code this quickly. It’s all a liability, not an asset.
The words of the law don't seem to matter much anymore. If the government does something, and they receive no push back (either from the people supposed to be checking-and-balancing, or from the victim in the form of successful lawsuits), then they, for all intents and purposes, can in practice do that thing.
> I'm not convinced "the law says you can't do that" is super meaningful in 2026.
In fact, we're finding out very quickly that "what the government can do" is in practice, only limited by the rest of the government's willingness to push back. The set of things grows every time the government tries something new and receives no push back from the other two branches of government that are captured by the same political party.
In a somewhat democratic country, it's limited by what the people vote for.
Unfortunately, right now the people voted for obscene corruption and dismantling of institutions and selling pardons and a destruction of law and order.
Republican politicians support this and do not stop Trump because stopping Trump will get them voted out.
People who themselves eschew nuance should not be surprised when they and everything they touch are polarized into "good" and "bad" buckets. I'm pretty neutral to most companies on earth, because their CEOs wisely don't make wild comments every other day on their personal politics.
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