Maybe it’s a process. Many of the transitions you mentioned did bring shitty apps (not all of them, the ones replacing tech for tech were mostly ok, the ones democratizing dev did come with a quality drop), but eventually Darwinism will take effect and trim the long tail.
Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.
The risk is people who incidentally get into software engineering through using agents probably won’t be aware of any of that. And probably wouldn’t care even if they did. And for most software they’ll create, single user, perhaps even single use, it’ll be fine.
And for those who might care about these things, they’ll probably just be facing constant pressure to deliver more, faster, perhaps with less.
One of the issue about literacy in algorithms, data modeling, efficiency, development patterns, systems designs… is that people either aren’t aware of them (and in the best case scenario reinvent the wheel), don’t care about them, or feel they aren’t given the time to invest in learning them (or worse, might be penalized for it).
I feel like it will be like going back to the 80s, when PCs became a norm and most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation. Thousands of shareware apps you had to navigate, everyone trying to solve the same problems from different angles..
I do agree quality will be missed, and shadow IT will be again a big issue like at the end of the 80s and early 90s.
> most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation.
I don't think so. Back then, the pool of people doing such a thing basically self-selected for intelligent, motivated types who were capable of learning on their own. The new "programmers" "programming" via Claude Code are going to be very different from those hobbyists you're talking about.
Because back then you had to care about the differences of e.g. 16bit vs 32bit datatypes & instructions, hardware limitations are not known to modern grown-up dev people - they think hardware is unlimited.
Earlier you really had do understand what you were doing, today cou can get along with a prompt - which works great, until it doesnt. Not to blame any vibecode hobbyist here, though real application development usually required some degree of deeper understanding back then.
I think the point is that you had to be deeply curious and more of a "hacker" or "computer nerd" type to be able to figure things out.
But I think the same applies to not just AI but various tools that have abstracted away the complexity of things over the years.
For example, I would imagine the average person deploying some sort of web app or API today knows far less about networking and infrastructure than someone doing it 10 to 20 years ago.
Yes, exactly. I'm reminded of the articles detailing how Gen Z has fewer computer skills than previous generations because computing has become so abstracted -- turn on iPhone, tap button. "What's a directory?" -- files just kind of exist on these devices without any real notion of _where_, as far as the user knows. Stuff like that.
Compare that to say 30ish years ago. If you wanted to do something as simple as play a computer game you had to know how to navigate a command line, know about device drivers, make a boot disk, etc. Users were a whole lot closer to the realities of what makes computing work. And no internet, at least as we know it now. You really had to have a certain mindset to be a developer.
Knowing that genuine, disincentivized creativity is exceedingly rare (especially in the West), you can assume that the answer looks something like a carrot or a stick.
All people affected should file a complaint with your ISP and with Oficina de Atención al Usuario de Telecomunicaciones claiming financial loss for arbitrary service censorship.
I've been filing complaints since a year ago, told others to do the same too, nothing happens. There been moments I've meant to deploy fixes to issues but I cannot, because some tooling goes offline.
I've claimed financial loss, claimed sanity loss and everything in-between, but I'm afraid unless something reaches the European/EU courts, Spain will continue to be in the pocket of the La Liga owners.
Straight up fucking censorship with wide collateral being completely accepted in a Western country in 2026, beyond comprehension how this is allowed.
Whenever I get a little down over how much power unelected corporations have in my country, I can at least cheer myself up a little by being thankful that something as stupid as football doesn't have enough power here to control whether or not I have internet access.
The problem is probably just distributed responsibility. If I lived in Spain I'd set their website as my proxy for everything that doesn't work before I filed my complaints so they could directly address each problem..
That's interesting. Do you have further reading? I've seen AFACT v iiNet, but that doesn't look to be the source of "cost of renting", just that the ISP isn't responsible for their users.
> Justice Perram discussed the idea of speculative invoicing within Australia
> Representing to a consumer that they have a liability which they do not may well be misleading and deceptive conduct within the meaning of s 18 of the Australian Consumer Law and it may be equally misleading to represent to someone that their potential liability is much higher than it could ever realistically be. There may also be something to be said for the idea that speculative invoicing might be a species of unconscionable conduct within one or other of s 21 of the Australian Consumer Law or s 12CB of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001 (Cth).
> Further, even if speculative invoicing was deemed to be lawful within Australia, the damages that the individual may be liable to are often calculated differently to that of the United States. In Australia, damages are compensatory in nature, meaning to compensate the plaintiff for the loss suffered. One Intellectual Property Lawyer has been quoted as saying, ‘If a film costs $20, the damages would ordinarily be expected to be $20.’
If anyone who’s capable in Spain set a petition or the relevant steps and put it on HN. I’m pretty sure any Spanish resident in HN would be more than happy to take part even if it means to send a Bizum for the cause.
(Sadly as living in Spain for about a year I’m still not in such place to raise this or understand the full steps needed)
If this is done at the DNS level, run your own DNS. If not, use a VPN. Taking this to the courts is a long term solution, but in the short term you want to act on your own to evade censorship and oppression.
If it's purely DNS blocking (no IP redirection or blocking), your own recursive resolver (eg, unbound) shouldn't be affected, assuming the ISP doesn't also intercept unencrypted DNS queries. If there's also interception, encrypted DNS upstream might help (assuming they're not blocked entirely, repressive countries do this, so far not in EU)
I don't think any of them will help in Spain case though, I believe the ISP/court choose to block the IP range entirely, which hit Cloudflare customers. DNS hijinks won't solve those.
It’s football. I’m pretty sure there are a great many countries you could induce to do insane things if the populace could be made to believe that said insane things will help football.
I mean, didn’t El Salvador and Honduras go to war over football back in the 60’s? And I seem to recall there was a football match which helped precipitate the dissolution of Yugoslavia - national identities coalesced around football tribes.
these things need to be brought to an international court who would require the government to act. Otherwise nothing happens, because institutions are completely corrupt.
It takes time, money and a strong legal team, but maybe IT companies maybe can put this together?
Because the EU as a whole is quite happy to censor and generally wield the same tricks as "non-Western" countries in their desires to combat misinformation (however our EU bureaucrats define it), child abuse materials (see Chat Control that thing is not going to go away), and hatred (oh boy).
We've never guaranteed the right to free speech and because we haven't it's a slippery slope all the way back down to the furnaces of autocracy we sprang from.
The Spanish president has come out on record saying we don't deserve anonymity on the internet.
Not sure why you get downvoted. EU censors quite a bit. I can't read about 10 Telegram channels that I could access just 3 years ago, and the list is growing.
All due to "vioalted laws of [my country]". (said near-east related channels have nothing to do with my country, government just doesn't want me to read them)
Some people deemed "russian assets" are not just censored, but stripped of ability to leave EU and prevented from being able to live in EU at the same time by financial sanctions, etc. Of course this doesn't happen to actual politicians in power, for whatever reason those never get sanctioned by EC, despite doing more "damage" than random blabberheads on twitter.
"EU" doesn't censor anything, there isn't even any authority nor infrastructure that could do that.
Individual countries, like Spain, does have a bunch of censorship though, this is pretty clear and evident already. But I think if you want to share something useful or even informative, you need to add what country this experience of yours is about, because it's not true in any/every EU country.
Other ways EU censors centrally are EU wide travel bans that individual countries can issue to prevent political speech by foreigners, under the guise of preventing "incitement" and preserving "stability". Doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta from UK is one prominent example.
Yet other way EU censors centrally are EC sanctions on individual journalists or "journalists" to prevent them from any economic activity within EU, incl. publishing.
Other way EU censors centrally is via DSA, which results in seemingly random bans of channels on "social media" like Telegram, under the guise of fighting "terrorism". Basically this way it tries to silence people it otherwise supports killing without due process.
Used my digital certificate (which is installed in the browser), but AFAIK, you can use Cl@ve on that page above too.
In the past, I've cited BOE-A-2022-10757 (https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2022-10757), done a reclamació for the repeated loss of lawful access on my connection, and a denúncia about a broader overblocking practice affecting access to lawful services.
Also, supposedly, we should be able to make claims to CNMC as well, but haven't figured out how. Also of course, been complaining to my ISP every time it happens too.
Sadly, it won't accomplish anything. La Liga seems to have enough political power in the country to bury all of that. Probably bribing everyone involved.
Corruption at that level could mean organized crime. Is there a culture of betting through illegal bookies, are they fixing matches, or ¿porque no los dos?
Well, I think when the organized crime is registered as proper businesses and they have the judges on their side even if the law isn't, I think we just call that "for-profit capitalism" nowadays.
It would be great if there was a webpage with clear instructions on how to do this, maybe fill out a few questions and get a printable pdf you can mail, or at least telling you how to file an online complaint. Making complaints very low friction will lead to more of those and perhaps more attention to the issue.
Snail mail uses up physical space so it might get more attention, it would be hilarious to see news reports of truckloads of complaint mail being dumped in front of the whatever office.
> It would be great if there was a webpage with clear instructions on how to do this, maybe fill out a few questions and get a printable pdf you can mail, or at least telling you how to file an online complaint. Making complaints very low friction will lead to more of those and perhaps more attention to the issue.
This is a great idea, we definitively should make this happen! If people are curious on collaborating on something, reach out, email in profile (English or Spanish emails welcome!).
It's Spain man. Nothing will happen, maybe they will call their buddies in La Liga to ask what's up if the complains pile up and then will ignore all of them if they are assured everything works as expected.
Also Fastmail user for many years, with custom domain. I use specific email addresses per service with Bitwarden’s recent feature (by hand before this). My personal address is shared with few people.
I set up specific folders based on aliases. Thanks to GDPR I have found a few companies that have shared / sold my data illegally (the company-assigned address popped up somewhere else) and managed to have them delete my data right away.
I fret losing my domain, and that my recovery addresses are Gmail and Outlook - which could be lost at any time.
I would like to see government issue a lifetime inbox in the same way they issue you a SSN, a passport or driver license so I can have that as last line recovery.
But on the other hand, if we had that politicians would likely enforce mandatory identification across all web services…
Some Latin American cities were designed as grids (100m x 100m squares), and numbering of blocks spans a hundred per block (first block is 0 to 100 house numbers).
So if you are at 200s in one street and are looking for a house at 1200s, you know you are a kilometer away.
This with numbered streets is awesome to navigate. Buenos Aires has the first, but named streets. La Plata in Argentina has both.
Chicago is like this, there are numbered streets on the south side, but all the streets on the north and west sides are named, however they're very good about putting the grid numbers on the named street signs, so it's easy to figure out where you are. 100 addresses per block, 8 blocks to a mile, so if I'm at Western and Belmont, that's 2400W 3200N, so 3 miles west and 4 miles north of downtown. All the Metro stations list the grid numbers on the signs at the exits too
I bought two office phones for 30 euros each (Yealink) and set up a VOIP plan with voip.ms for my 8 and 9 YO kids.
I recently got divorced, so there is a phone at each house in case they want to reach out to the other parent directly. Ex and I did not want the kids to feel their right to reach the other parent needed to ask for permission
Family has Softphone in their mobiles, so the full family is a speed dial away.
Most fund managers have an IQ of 50. And they get paid by fees. They will put your pension money into OpenAI without a doubt, as it’s easier to participate, crash and shrug that stay out.
“Nobody got fired for hiring McKinsey” in the PE bros era.
They would not be allowed to do so - too many shareholders. That’s why e.g. SpaceX will be going public even though Elon Musk would want to keep it private
