AI coding assistants significantly accelerate repetitive tasks, but they lack true contextual reasoning, long-term architectural insight, and accountability. Human developers remain essential for critical problem-solving and design.
I was an "operator" on a Tandem NonStop. First was Pitney Bowes, I preferred the night shift. In the computer room, there was a Tandem, and a UNIVAC. My job was mostly swapping disk packs on the Tandem, and swapping tapes on the UNIVAC.
One of my jobs was to shutdown the dialup system (customers mailing machines would send data about the mailings they made overnight). I had to shutdown the dialup lines according to the time zones across Canada. I decided to write a script to automate it. My script would shutdown each phone line in order. The first time I ran it, I "broke" the Tandem. My script was a basic loop. It would check the time, and shutdown one of the timezones. First time I ran it the Tandem "mainframe" froze. I had to call "Doug" in the middle of the night, I was freaking out. Doug came in, looked at my script and quietly pointed out that the time command was a high priority system. My script didn't have any "waits" in it, the loop I wrote was constantly asking the system the time, taking up 100% of the processing. "Doug" had to reboot the Tandem, and after the "wait" was put into my script, all was good.
After I left Pitney Bowes I was an operator at the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police), that system had the OMPPAC system on it (Ontario Municipal Police Automated Cooperative), The criminal database for the Province of Ontario.
Things are different when "mission-critical" is the highest priority.
Before PC's really got popular, I went out to a petroleum pipeline installation one time where they were just unboxing one of these Tandem rigs.
They were going to use it to further automate, control, and account for transfers like some of the other oil companies were doing with their mainframes. As part of an expected technology advance at the time.
Here it was not just a CRT terminal and a printer, but the whole thing right there in a fairly hazardous location in the blockhouse office where contractors would do their hand calculations.
I was there to take readings on the mechanical totalizers, especially on the piping section we had independently calibrated, and bring samples back to the lab for precision viscosity and density determination to more decimal places than available elsewhere. Along with all kinds of other routine and research parameters.
Turns out I was the pioneer in digital densitometry among the multinational contractors. That's another story altogether but within a decade they all had it and I was in more demand after the niche had grown than it was when I owned the niche. People still never want me to stop.
Anyway, I had a pretty good handle on floating-point error and was doing my part to reign it in with improvements in physical measurement.
It didn't take long to realize that my Atari would be basically capable of handling all of the things they were going to use the Tandem for.
The shortcomings would be the redundancy/reliability and Atari just couldn't count that high :)
When you're moving large numbers of barrels the numbers go through the roof when you convert to liters or even worse, some currencies.
If the figures didn't agree very well with manual calculation using 16-digit calculators, some big shot may very well hit the roof.
I would have had to hook two Ataris together and try to get more precision somehow at the same time as try some redundant reliability. Never did.
Although within a couple years I did hook up two TRS-80s together and they were quite adversarial . . .
I was down in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in 2008 for BGG (Board Game Geek convention). I tracked down the address to the id office, and got John Carmack to sign my id ball cap (had it custom embroidered). I didn't meet Carmack, but the kind receptionist took my cap back to his office, and he signed it.
I set my phone on DND when I go to bed. The only notifications I let through the DND are my security cameras (internal), and 2 phone numbers, my sister, and my business partner.
Android, I think, does something this automatically. At least, I don't hear it all night, and when I go to check in the morning I get bombarded with notifications that seemed to have occured overnight.
I have a good friend who WAS observant of the Sabath when we were roommates. His new girlfriend, who was also Jewish, lived in the same apartment building 1 floor down. He'd frequently ask me to be his "Shabbat Goy". On Friday nights he and his girlfriend would like to watch a movie on their TV (VHS at that time). They'd start to watch the movie before Shabbat started, and I'd go down to their apartment at the designated time (after the movie), and turn off their TV for them. That arrangement was made BEFORE Shabbat obviously, as Jews can't ask a non-Jew to do "work" after Shabbat has started.
I also attended many Shabbat dinners at his parents house. There were always a lot of questions I had, about the fridge light coming on when it was opened (they would unscrew the light(s) before Shabbat). They had an alarm system too, with motion sensors that would turn on the red LED whenever someone walked by them, so they covered the motion sensor during Shabbat. It was pretty fascinating to learn all this stuff as a non-Jew.
In Canada you can record someone (phone call, in person, etc) if just one party consents to the recording. In other words, if I'm a phone call with someone, even if there are several people on the call, it's NOT illegal for me to record them, as long as I'm a participant in the call. It's called the "one party consent" exception. I have no obligation to ask, or tell the others on the call that I'm recording.
There are legitimate reasons for having one party consent legal. My experience with employer harassment has been that it’s extremely hard to prove discriminatory behavior without being able to record without consent.
In California you can record without consent if you have reasons to suspect a crime is going to be committed. It's not the most straightforward thing to get away with and you should work with a lawyer before you do it to be sure it will be accepted as evidence, but you can totally do it.
Laws that make something legal or not conditional on a hypothetical that hasn't happened yet are kind of lowsy. It's like the stand your ground one's where you can just say you believed your life was in danger.
I'm not implying anything, just criticizing laws where guilt or innocence rests on claim of a hypothetical situation. Shooting someone when you believe your life may be in danger. One party consent recording allowed when you believe a crime may happen.
There's always the risk of being caught while doing it, or to be exposed that you've done it before the time that you intend to "reveal" it.
So it's better to talk with a laywer and get informed of your options and the risks, and how to go about it, before you do it, not merely before you reveal you did it.
And this kind of thing, trouble with a boss/landlord/etc, is a lot more likely to personally impact the average person than any sort of PV-related scenario. Single party consent is a clear net positive for most people.
It’s such a depressing situation. Steve Huffman got caught red handed making up lies about Apollo’s dev for no reason whatsoever. I wish I was exaggerating.
Every time I try to describe the event, it ends up sounding like low quality flamebait. Yet it’s a complete description of what happened.
He never acknowledged it, either. It was just evil. Usually there are confounding factors or reasons to be on the founder’s side, or to at least see the situation from their point of view. But in this case, it was a blatant lie.
The most charitable explanation I’ve ever been able to think of is “maybe Huffman literally forgot that he misunderstood the Apollo dev because he was so stressed.” But eventually I concluded that requires so much mental gymnastics that I may as well compete at the Olympics. And even in that situation, he should’ve said something.
Huffman was a part of the original YC batch. There were no YC alums before him. This was the era when pg wrote “Don’t be evil”, which was at least a good idea, if not an implicit guideline to all founders. And then this happens a decade and some change later.
Memory can be a funny thing, people repeat stories to themselves to keep memories fresh, but with each retelling the story can shift. "I thought he threatened me but then he clarified that he didn't" could turn into "He seemed to threaten me, but then chickened out when I confronted him" His memory of admitting he made an error could turn into a memory of still feeling threatened but trying to let the Apollo dev save face.
All this is to say that Steve Huffman might not be deliberately lying in this instance. Maybe. It's hard to give him too much credit since he's already shown himself to be a snake who edits other people's comments and that's certainly not something that could be done by accident. Nonetheless, memory is a funny thing.
> All this is to say that Steve Huffman might not be deliberately lying in this instance.
Huffman has had 26+ days to correct the record. He has done nothing to that end. He made a "potentially career-ending" allegation, which hurt the reputation of the developer of Apollo, Christian Selig.
June 8th: Selig released his side of the story, along with messages which were sent to him from a Reddit employee as well as from moderators engaged in a subsequent call with Reddit:
June 9th (a full 24 hours later): Huffman had the facts, including the recording, which confirmed their mutual understanding. Huffman could have revised his stance there and then. Instead, Huffman doubled down, effectively reiterating the lie through his scare-quote and instead criticized Selig for acting publicly to defend his reputation against Reddit's internal and external slander:
Huffman is the CEO of the Reddit platform and nothing is stopping him from apologizing for making a potentially "potentially career-ending lie" against the developer of Apollo, Christian Selig. He hasn't made a peep on the platform since June 9th.
If it wasn't deliberate, then he's had nearly a month to speak up for the truth. At some point, refusing to correct the record, a lie does become deliberate.
---
Here's TechCrunch's reporting on the situation, if you prefer to hear it from a journalist:
This is an excellent comment — thank you for getting these sources together. I’ve favorited it in case I have to explain the situation to someone again.
Do you happen to know whether the call was with Steve himself, or some other Reddit employee? If it wasn’t Steve, then this whole thing was a giant miscommunication, which I’ve always suspected from the beginning.
Boy it’s nice to feel hopeful about this for once. I really hope it wasn’t Steve.
Steve or not doesn't improve anything about the situation, even worse, since it wouldn't even hurt his ego to apologize on behalf of employee he chose radio silence instead, it just shows the intent is to make third party devs fuck off the platform by whatever means necessary
I read it was another employee, so maybe their impression got miscommunicated and the CEO assumed the worst - except without any evidence. Which is still bad behavior given that he hasn't addressed the recording evidence publicly. IIRC he Kafkaesquely accused the very act of recording as evidence of aggression/blackmailing, which is just totally out to lunch IMO.
Unfortunately what sealed it for me was Steve’s response during his followup AMA when someone asked him about the Apollo dev. He said that the dev often said one thing and did another. Christian (the dev) called him out on it and said “I give you permission to name a single time this has happened.” No response.
In other words, Steve doubled down yet again and tried to do the same damn thing after he was caught. Why lie like this?
A developer’s reputation is their most important asset. What Steve did (or tried to do, till the phone conversation proved otherwise) was simply awful.
> maybe Huffman literally forgot that he misunderstood the Apollo dev
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the person on the call wasn't Huffman himself. Selig was talking to some Reddit employee, who presumably then told Huffman about the call.
It's possible that the employee who talked to Selig didn't 100% accurately describe what was said in the call (because he didn't have a transcript to check what was said), and then Huffman misunderstood whatever the employee said further to come up with the blackmail accusation.
I thought the call was with Steve himself. If this is true, it changes everything.
Would anyone mind checking? My wife and I have been in the hospital for a month, and it’s 2am here. Their voices and mannerisms sounded similar and I always assumed it was Steve.
If it wasn’t Steve, then I’ll immediately reverse my opinion. The evildoer was the employee.
I looked it up, Selig said it was an employee [1]:
> As mentioned in the last post, thankfully I recorded the phone call and can show this to be false, to the extent that Reddit even apologized four times for misinterpreting it:
> Reddit: "That's a complete misinterpretation on my end. I apologize. I apologize immediately."
> (Note: as Steve declined to ever talk on a call, the call is with a Reddit representative)
I just want to thank you for leaving your comment. It’s a rare experience to have my opinion shifted so dramatically due to a crucial missing piece of info. People will say that Steve is still at fault — and he is — but intent was the crucial part of it for me. Being foolish is infinitely better than being evil, and I just couldn’t see how Steve making up a lie was anything but evil.
He didn’t lie. He was misinformed.
Steve is still making questionable choices, but thank god he’s not who I thought he was. I was about to give up on pg’s original vision of YC and conclude that it must’ve all been a grift, just like the peanut gallery has been saying all along.
Really. Thanks. Have a wonderful week, wherever you are.
He may have originally been misinformed, but instead of apologising, he doubled down and said the call was leaked (in his AMA). Then went right back to repeating the lies in interviews.
From his AMA:
>His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.
It was a different employee than Steve on the call that apparently perpetuated the misunderstanding despite it being cleared up immediately and the employee apologizing; however, Steve continued to repeat the claim after Apollo Dev had refuted and proved the claim false, which the media (such as The Verge) had picked up.
So though it was not originated from Steve, Steve perpetuated it when he should have known better.
> It’s such a depressing situation. Steve Huffman got caught red handed making up lies about Apollo’s dev for no reason whatsoever. I wish I was exaggerating.
B) the dev absolutely was trying to get money out of them. You can't make a demand, then say 'uh, im kinda kidding' repeatedly. If someone held a gun to your head and asked for your wallet multiple times, each time saying they were kinda joking, what would you do?
That said, Huffman et al absolutely shouldn't have aired dirty laundry.
I did listen to it. The dev was calling the Reddit rep's bluff, effectively saying "if Apollo is really costing you so much money, why not just buy it for $cost/2?". He wasn't asking for personal hush money. He clarified this on the call and the rep understood and apologised for misunderstanding. Then Huffman went and publicly claimed the misunderstood version of events
The dev was obviously joking. What part of the recording suggests he wasn't? Exact timestamp please because I want to go back and listen to the context around it on my own rather than relying on your self selected soundbites/quotes.
There's been a miscommunication. I want you to provide the timestamp that makes you think the Apollo dev was serious.
I've listened to the recording and it's obvious he was joking every time he asked for the $10 million. I want to know why you think otherwise and am asking for the exact timestamp where you believe his threat could be interpreted as serious. I honestly have no idea which part of the recording could be interpreted as a serious threat and I don't believe such a timestamp exists, hence my inability to find it.
The apollo dev is based in Canada and recorded the phone calls with Reddit without them knowing. The Apollo dev released transcripts (and perhaps recordings) of the calls to disprove statements made by Reddit.
Has a lawyer weighed in on if this was actually legal? It’s concerning wiretap laws with participants in two different countries, so the legality might not be just “is it legal under Canada law”
If a Canadian, connecting to his Canadian ISP hacks into a computer in the US, if they aren't extradited, I think they should be cautious about traveling to the US.
The law exists to protect the person being recorded, so if the person being recorded is somewhere where the law is in effect, then it can be applied.
There is case-law supporting something similar within the US at least: if a person in e.g. California (where all parties' consent is needed) is recorded by a person in e.g. Virginia (where only one party's consent is needed) then they have violated the California law.
I don’t think recording and hacking are equivalent.
Recording is a passive act that entirely takes place entirely within the territory of the person doing the recording.
Whereas hacking involves accessing a computer system that is in a different jurisdiction, which necessarily involves actively communicating with it and sending it commands.
Recording a call is more like listening to a radio station. Countries may make it illegal to listen to certain communications, but as soon as those radio waves leave that jurisdiction then they are fair game for anyone who wants to listen to them.
Pretty much everybody should be cautious about entering the US!
Legally because the recording takes place entirely in Canada. For practical purposes getting something prosecuted across national borders is incredibly complicated even for serious crimes that are crimes in both nations with clear jurisdiction and basically impossible beyond that scope.
In fact only an American would have the temerity to imagine that their laws might apply to someone in another country merely by calling them on the phone.
Good luck trying to record a phone call on any modern smartphone. They purposely make it nearly impossible, unless you want to use speakerphone and the analog hole.
And while it might feel counterintuitive how obvious a good idea it is, it becomes a lot more intuitive when you consider the contrary implications. You can not only be a party to something without being able to demonstrate what you observed, but you can be a party to something where any convincing accusation about your own involvement is equally compelling to your own recount by default. Even if you don’t realize you’re a party to anything in particular.
Being able to record your own experience is a matter of basic autonomy and self defense. Being denied it is a gift to anyone with the power or motivation to exploit that.
Edit: I didn’t even look at who was involved in the case. I am not remotely surprised to find the ruling favors political opponents, and I’m not swayed by that either. If anything, it’s better for everyone if PV has to play by the same rules as anyone they’re interacting with.
In the US the only function of two party consent laws is to allow people to lie about what they said. Even in two party consent states you can still report what someone said to you. And they can lie and say no I never said that. Without recordings it's just one person's word against the other's.
I interpret the "surprisingly" as shocked that that many have common sense one party consent rules. My skepticism would think idiotic rules to be the majority.
From my (European) perspective this sounds strange. Wouldn't you be worried when e.g. your employer or partner is secretly recording your conversations with them? In Canada it seems to be even legal to publish these conversations without consent, though I don't know about the US.
Publishing is a whole other thing, but why should I be worried that someone is recording what I'm saying, in general?
And if I'm discussing sensitive information (say, I'm discussing an extra-marital affair, or illegal conduct), why should I think I can rely on the law to protect me from the recording? Is my marriage less ruined if the recording was illegally made and illegally presented to my spouse?
> Publishing is a whole other thing, but why should I be worried that someone is recording what I'm saying, in general?
Well, this reminds me of
> You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
The phrase - widely used in discussions of Internet security - is most commonly attributed to Joseph Goebbels in 1933. You probably agree with that statement while I have different intuitions.
> why should I think I can rely on the law to protect me from the recording?
Why should you think the law can protect you from anything? Because violating the law comes with a substantial potential cost, which is a risk many actors are not willing to take.
> You probably agree with that statement while I have different intuitions.
I most certainly do not. That phrase has nothing to do with this discussion in fact - it applies to cases of making private statements either public or at least known to the state apparatus.
Private recordings of private conversations have no similar issue. In my opinion, recording a conversation you and I have is no different from keeping hold of a letter or an email that you sent me, and it's certainly not something I routinely fear.
And, when I do say things that I fear others may hear, I am not content with the fact that I could sue you for recording that information. I would go to technical lengths to actually try to ensure that you can't record it.
> Why should you think the law can protect you from anything? Because violating the law comes with a substantial potential cost, which is a risk many actors are not willing to accept.
The law has almost no power in private settings. Technically, if I bought a music CD from Sony, I am not allowed to play it to you, since that would require performance rights. Does Sony or anyone on the planet expect me to fear legal repercussions for doing so in the privacy of my home? Obviously not. It will only even become a possible legal issue if I start publicizing this in some way.
Similarly, even if it's technically illegal for me to hold recordings of my conversations with friends, it is in practice all but impossible for me to be prosecuted about it unless and until I publish them. Even if you suspected I did record our conversations, you would need significant proof of that before convincing a judge to issue a search warrant to try to prove I did. If I am simply keeping these for my own purposes and not sharing with others, you will never have such proof. So, even if it were deeply illegal, I would have very little reason to fear it in practice.
It's kind of relevant though. Germany had a very bad experiences with being spied on by gestapo informants. After the war, East Germany had a secret service, the Stasi, which massively spied on its citizens. Phone calls were routinely listened to, and countless informants collected information about people they were close to. Trust was a rare commodity. Americans (luckily) never had the experience of living in an authoritarian surveillance state, where everyone could be suspected to spy on you. So it not surprising surveillance isn't taken so lightly today as in the US.
Oregon, where this is filed, also has one-party consent on phone calls. Considering the plaintiff, this is mostly about hidden cameras and surreptitious recording in person.
There are lots of other types of phones besides mobile phones (nowadays, usually implying VoIP somewhere in most places, but some countries still have analog landlines, too). Assuming that all phone calls are either made with Android or iOS is reductive to say the least...
