Having lived in China for five years and seeing how it is done there (literally everywhere), I see this as a payment problem. There is no sensible, low cost payment infrastructure to support this safely. Instead most of the west has a fractured app ecosystem where each app ‘does payment’ rather than via a set of trusted payment apps that do the security up front and then passes to the provider.
For example, in the article the photos show an anonymous QR code you’d scan with your camera, rather than in China where you’d use Alipay or WeChat, whose app you’d use to scan the QR.
When I returned from China, it took a while to readjust to the heightened (and often expensive) friction of payments.
Not saying scams don’t exist in China, just that the payment provider gives some guarantees on the veracity of the claim made by the QR code
This is a cost saving play by the car parks operators.
Here in the UK we had car payment stations: You enter your car registration number, you pay by card or contactless. Done. Safe. It works.
BUT, this is more expensive for the operator to install and maintain than just sticking a notice to tell you to install an app and to use it to pay.
That being said, usually the QR code is not required it is just to make it "easier" as the notice explicitely says which app to install and provides the unique reference of the car park, too. You may also be able to pay over the phone rather than using the app. This is all shown on the article's first picture.
So, really they could just remove those scam-prone QR codes. I suspect that they don't care, though, and even profit from those scams since they can fine you for not having actually paid.
Yes, so worst case you paid a little bit of money to the wrong account. This is much worse - usually the QR code leads you to an app that then authenticates with your bank and can transfer and arbitrary amount of money out.
The problem I think is with the bank. They don't give you a way to authorize a single payment or authenticate yourself without just giving away total access to your funds.
It should be like cryptocurrency where there is a separation of the public and private key. Or even better, something like chaumian e-cash. I feel like that would pretty much shut down the majority of financial crime.
Since it's all tied to real IDs, wouldn't that involve heavy risks from the scammer's side? I know it's possible, but still a bit less risk if your Scam HQ operates overseas.
I am currently in year 16 and have been taking web development seriously for about a year. I am a member of two coding groups and it has now become pretty much a hobby. I'm currently working on a SAAS as well. Would love to connect
I’m a solo founder/developer (https://kayshun.co) my relationship/usage of LLMs for codegen has been complicated.
At first I was all in with Copilot and various similar plugins for neovim. It helped me get going but did produce the worst code in the application. Also I found (personal preference) that the autocomplete function actually slowed me down; it made me pause or even prevented me from seeing what I was doing rather than just typing out what I needed to. I stopped using any codegen for about four months at the end of 2024; I felt it was not making me more productive.
This year it’s back on the table with avante[0] and cursor (the latter back off the table due to the huge memory requirements). Then recently Claude Code dropped and I am currently feeling like I have productivity super powers. I’ve set it up in a pair programming style (old XP coder) where I write careful specs (prompts) and tests (which I code); it writes code; I review run the tests and commit. I work with it. I do not just let it just run as I have found I waste more time unwinding its output than watching each step.
From being pretty disillusioned six months ago I can now see it as a powerful tool.
Can it replace devs? In my opinion, some. Like all things it’s garbage in garbage out. So the idea a non-technical product manager can produce quality outputs seems unlikely to me.
Similar to me with CoPilot, I found it made it harder for me to spin up my brain to full power to tackle a genuinely tricky problem because I was letting it solve the simple ones for me. I stopped using it after about 3 months and had a total pause from CodeGen tools. Now I use Claude like a very documentation-knowledgeable junior developer who can write code very quickly. I guide it on the architecture and approach and sanity check what it does but let it save me a tonne of typing. I don’t use it for everything but as a CTO for an early stage startup that needs to turn somethings around quickly it’s incredibly useful.
I like this view. I’m not especially successful (by any of the measures knocking about) but in the midst of a startup again for the last year.
This time I work how I want to work and am actually enjoying myself. The whole 80 hours a week startup thing is padded with a lot of performance art in my experience. I am actively avoiding all that this time around. I find that I solve a lot of things by not doing them or solving them when not actively trying.
We’ve made great progress so far.
I really cannot understand consciousness. And if I am honest nor do I see peoples fascination with it. Especially now that scientists are trying to measure, they seem to come up short and some posit that it must a quantum effect or something else.
I am not sure what new learning all the research and thinking brings: I am lost it all the “arguments”; I really do not understand.
A lot of way smarter people than me think it’s a worthwhile concept to wrestle with. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it.
A lot of people way smarter than me agonised over the nature of the soul too. Is it that debate replayed? Are we just trying to justify humans “specialness”?
I think the core concept is pretty simple, it's meta cognition. A feedback loop of observing oneself for the purpose of understanding which part of your observations is yourself and which is the environment. Just like inteligence, its scales from rudimentary in animals to overdeveloped in humans.
The only way to know if it's genuinely occurring or not is to observe the internal state... which is a bit problematic for biological organisms since we tend to die in the process. But for AI it should be fairly straightforward to verify once DNN analysis progresses enough.
Once you start considering it just metacognition, it gets to be a much more useful concept, but most people seem to desperately want it to be "special".
Ask any therapist, consciousness has limits, it has bound depth. It takes a lot of work to re-train it. It isn't a magical human only special thing.
Slightly tangential is the work I did on a National digital identity platform. It enables personal information sharing from trusted sources (birth records, tax records, banks) and could simply enable true/false responses to queries such as “Are you over 18” instead of sadly spraying PI data everywhere to be lost or stolen.
We as a team worked super hard and were super proud of what the platform could do. We even won some awards. But due to politics and bureaucracy its capabilities were never used and today the service is a national joke and really only used to logon to government services. It is going to be replaced with something new and shiny.
Now, I look back and think why did I care so much and work so hard. Why was I so naive that it would be used as designed.
I have to second this. No one I know complained when it was introduced, and I saw no complaints aired in the media of any noticeable degree. We still have too much unnecessary plastic in packaging.
My wife is Irish, and they started the removal of plastic bags over 20 years ago. It was carefully phased in over time. It led to a 90% reduction in plastic bag use [0]. They also weigh your trash (in Dublin, anyway) as a means of cost pressure to reduce waste and encourage recycling. It is stated to have reduced waste by 50% [1].
They weigh country-wide. In Ireland waste collection is done by private companies and they charge by weight. As I recall, they have something like subscription plans [1]. I'm Irish but I live in New Zealand now, and here the rubbish collection is paid for by your Council rates.
I was still living in Ireland when the plastic ban was introduced. There was push-back from some companies that make plastic bags, unsurprisingly, but it worked really well.
There was a bit of push-back here in NZ too, similar to what happened in Ireland. The usual grumbling, about interfering greenies, loss of freedoms, etc.
[1] This is an example of one company's offerings:
My take is that it is attempting a similar “intervention” as the Agile Manifesto did, but less well thought through or phrased.
The data science/ engineering domain appears to often produce outcomes like a good deal of 1990s software projects - projects that don’t produce good or expected results [0].
I posted a counterpoint recently [1] that said we should stop approaching data engineering like software engineering. Given what appears to be an almost endless number of data projects that produce little to no value to businesses, what should data professionals do to address the problem? This manifesto at least attempts to make a statement.
[0] I contributed to many of these at the beginning of my career!
In your article, your points about managing stateful data operations vs stateless tools is right on point. It's the eternal and ever-repeating argument that has to be made in every data shop I've ever been in when inevitably a manager or senior person suggests moving to scrum, because of this propagated lie that data engineers are just like software engineers. Glad to see it in writing.
Isn’t this a building quality concern rather than a concern of building location and style?
I live in a townhouse with shared walls on both sides and we never hear our neighbours. I’ve asked them if they hear us (we have teenagers) and one said never, the other said sometimes an occasional thud (teenagers wrestling).
Similarly we have a private outdoor space or deck and a shared open area. Both are great and well designed. I think it can be done well.
Yeah, I live in an apartment building. When I met my neighbor for the first time, she apologized for the noise her kid made. The walls here are of such a good quality, that I didn't even know she had a kid. Can't hear a thing.
