If things go our way, YouTube’s no­to­ri­ous un­skip­pable ads might be a thing of the past come this February.

As Phụ Nữ re­ports, Vietnam re­cently an­nounced Decree No. 342, which de­tails a num­ber of pro­vi­sions to the na­tional Advertising Law, due to take ef­fect from February 15, 2026. The ad­just­ments are ex­pected to place stricter con­trol on Vietnam’s on­line ad­ver­tis­ing ac­tiv­i­ties to pro­tect con­sumers and curb il­le­gal ads.

Amongst the de­cree ar­ti­cles, some stand­out stip­u­la­tions in­clude a hard cap on the wait­ing time be­fore view­ers can skip video and an­i­mated ads to no more than 5 sec­onds. Static ads must be im­me­di­ately can­cellable.

Additionally, the de­cree re­quires plat­forms to im­ple­ment clear and straight­for­ward ways for users to close ads with just one in­ter­ac­tion. False or vague sym­bols de­signed to con­fuse view­ers are for­bid­den.

Online plat­forms must add vis­i­ble sym­bols and guide­lines to help users re­port ads that vi­o­late the law and al­low them to turn off, deny, or stop see­ing in­ap­pro­pri­ate ads.

Beside rules about the user ex­pe­ri­ence, the de­cree also seeks to tightly reg­u­late ads for 11 groups of goods and ser­vices that di­rectly im­pact the en­vi­ron­ment and hu­man health, in­clud­ing: cos­met­ics; food and bev­er­ages; milk and for­mula for chil­dren; in­sec­ti­ci­dal chem­i­cals and sub­stances; med­ical sup­plies; health­care ser­vices; plant pes­ti­cides and vet­eri­nary drugs; fer­til­iz­ers; plant seeds and saplings; phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals; and al­co­holic drinks.

I’ve been track­ing AWS for a long time, with a spe­cific em­pha­sis on pric­ing. “What hap­pens if AWS hikes prices” has al­ways been some­thing of a boogey­man, trot­ted out as a hy­po­thet­i­cal to urge folks to avoid tak­ing de­pen­den­cies on a given provider.

Over the week­end - on a Saturday, no less - that hy­po­thet­i­cal be­came real.

AWS has qui­etly raised prices on its EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML by ap­prox­i­mately 15 per­cent. The p5e.48xlarge in­stance — eight NVIDIA H200 ac­cel­er­a­tors in a trench­coat — jumped from $34.61 to $39.80 per hour across most re­gions, while the p5en.48xlarge climbed from $36.18 to $41.61. Customers in US West (N. California) face steeper hikes, with p5e rates ris­ing from $43.26 to $49.75. The change had been telegraphed: AWS’s pric­ing page noted (and bizarrely, still does) that “current prices are sched­uled to be up­dated in January, 2026,” though the com­pany ne­glected to men­tion which di­rec­tion.

This comes about seven months af­ter AWS trum­peted “up to 45% price re­duc­tions” for GPU in­stances - though that an­nounce­ment cov­ered On-Demand and Savings Plans rather than Capacity Blocks. Funny how that works.

For the unini­ti­ated, Capacity Blocks are AWS’s an­swer to “I need guar­an­teed GPU ca­pac­ity for my ML train­ing job next Tuesday.” You re­serve spe­cific GPU in­stances for a de­fined time win­dow — any­where from a day to a few weeks out — and pay up front at a locked-in rate. It’s pop­u­lar with com­pa­nies do­ing se­ri­ous ML work who can’t af­ford to have a train­ing run in­ter­rupted be­cause spot ca­pac­ity evap­o­rated. The pric­ing should make it abun­dantly clear that the peo­ple us­ing this aren’t hob­by­ists; these are teams with bud­gets mea­sured in mil­lions.

An Amazon spox told us via email, “EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML pric­ing vary based on sup­ply and de­mand pat­terns, as de­scribed on the prod­uct de­tail page. This price ad­just­ment re­flects the sup­ply/​de­mand pat­terns we ex­pect this quar­ter.”

To be clear, AWS has raised prices be­fore, but rarely as a straight in­crease to a line item. The com­pany prefers to change pric­ing di­men­sions en­tirely, of­ten spin­ning this as a price re­duc­tion for most cus­tomers — a claim I’d char­ac­ter­ize as “creative.” Historical straight-up price in­creases have been tied to reg­u­la­tory ac­tions: per-SMS charges in cer­tain mar­kets and the like. This is dif­fer­ent.

The tim­ing is cu­ri­ous for an­other rea­son: it hands Azure and GCP a talk­ing point on a sil­ver plat­ter. Both have been ag­gres­sively court­ing ML work­loads, and “AWS just raised GPU prices 15%” is ex­actly the kind of am­mu­ni­tion en­ter­prise sales teams dream about. Whether the com­peti­tors can ac­tu­ally ab­sorb the de­mand is an­other ques­tion — GPU con­straints are hardly unique to AWS — but per­cep­tion mat­ters in en­ter­prise deals.

For com­pa­nies with Enterprise Discount Programs or other ne­go­ti­ated agree­ments, this raises un­com­fort­able ques­tions. EDPs typ­i­cally guar­an­tee dis­counts off pub­lic pric­ing — so if pub­lic pric­ing goes up 15 per­cent, your “discounted” rate just got more ex­pen­sive in ab­solute terms, even if the per­cent­age held steady. I ex­pect some pointed con­ver­sa­tions be­tween AWS ac­count teams and their larger cus­tomers in the com­ing weeks.

It’s hard not to see this as a bell­wether. GPUs are in­creas­ingly con­strained glob­ally as the world piv­ots to gen­er­at­ing slop-as-a-ser­vice in every con­ceiv­able do­main. The ques­tion is what this means for other re­source types down the road. Does the global RAM crunch mean RAM-centric ser­vices are next? You can ig­nore ML Capacity Block pric­ing if you’re not run­ning ma­chine learn­ing work­loads — which de­scribes north of 95 per­cent of most com­pa­nies’ cloud spend — but RAM touches every ser­vice AWS of­fers. Well, pos­si­bly ex­cept­ing their sup­port func­tion, though that’s rapidly be­com­ing “AI-Powered” too, so give it time.

The ca­nary-in-the-coal-mine con­cern here is­n’t GPUs specif­i­cally, but rather the prece­dent it es­tab­lishes. AWS has spent two decades con­di­tion­ing cus­tomers to ex­pect prices only ever go down. That ex­pec­ta­tion is now bro­ken. Once you’ve raised prices on one ser­vice and the world does­n’t end, the sec­ond in­crease be­comes eas­ier. And the third. The play­book has changed.

Keep an eye on ser­vices where AWS faces gen­uine sup­ply con­straints or where their costs have ma­te­ri­ally in­creased. Graviton in­stances have been priced ag­gres­sively to drive adop­tion — what hap­pens when ARM chip sup­ply tight­ens? Data trans­fer costs have been a cash cow for years, but they’ve also been sta­ble; are those next? I don’t have in­side in­for­ma­tion, but I do have pat­tern recog­ni­tion, and the pat­tern just shifted.

AWS has long ben­e­fited from the as­sump­tion that cloud pric­ing only trends in one di­rec­tion. That as­sump­tion died on a Saturday in January, with all the fan­fare of a Terms of Service up­date. The ques­tion is­n’t whether this mat­ters — it does. The ques­tion is whether it’s an anom­aly or the new nor­mal. My mon­ey’s on the lat­ter. ®

To play: Use ar­row keys or but­tons.

On December 28th, I de­liv­ered a speech en­ti­tled “A post-Amer­i­can, en­shit­ti­fi­ca­tion-re­sis­tant in­ter­net” for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the tran­script of that speech.

Many of you know that I’m an ac­tivist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — EFF. I’m about to start my 25th year there. I know that I’m hardly un­bi­ased, but as far as I’m con­cerned, there’s no group any­where on Earth that does the work of de­fend­ing our dig­i­tal rights bet­ter than EFF.

I’m an ac­tivist there, and for the past quar­ter-cen­tury, I’ve been em­broiled in some­thing I call “The War on General Purpose Computing.”

If you were at 28C3, 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that ti­tle. Those are the trenches I’ve been in since my very first day on the job at EFF, when I flew to Los Angeles to crash the in­au­gural meet­ing of some­thing called the “Broadcast Protection Discussion Group,” an un­holy al­liance of tech com­pa­nies, me­dia com­pa­nies, broad­cast­ers and ca­ble op­er­a­tors.

They’d gath­ered be­cause this lav­ishly cor­rupt American con­gress­man, Billy Tauzin, had promised them a new reg­u­la­tion — a rule ban­ning the man­u­fac­ture and sale of dig­i­tal com­put­ers, un­less they had been back­doored to spec­i­fi­ca­tions set by that group, spec­i­fi­ca­tions for tech­ni­cal mea­sures to block com­put­ers from per­form­ing op­er­a­tions that were dis­pre­ferred by these com­pa­nies’ share­hold­ers.

That rule was called “the Broadcast Flag,” and it ac­tu­ally passed through the American tele­coms reg­u­la­tor, the Federal Communications Commission. So we sued the FCC in fed­eral court, and over­turned the rule.

We won that skir­mish, but friends, I have bad news, news that will not sur­prise you. Despite wins like that one, we have been los­ing the war on the gen­eral pur­pose com­puter for the past 25 years.

Which is why I’ve come to Hamburg to­day. Because, af­ter decades of throw­ing my­self against a locked door, the door that leads to a new, good in­ter­net, one that de­liv­ers both the tech­no­log­i­cal self-de­ter­mi­na­tion of the old, good in­ter­net, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends join the party, that door has been un­locked.

Today, it is open a crack. It’s open a crack!

And here’s the weird­est part: Donald Trump is the guy who’s un­locked that door.

Oh, he did­n’t do it on pur­pose! But, thanks to Trump’s in­con­ti­nent bel­liger­ence, we are on the cusp of a “Post-American Internet,” a new dig­i­tal ner­vous sys­tem for the 21st cen­tury. An in­ter­net that we can build with­out wor­ry­ing about America’s de­mands and pri­or­i­ties.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not happy about Trump or his poli­cies. But as my friend Joey DaVilla likes to say “When life gives you SARS, you make sar­sa­par­illa.” The only thing worse than ex­pe­ri­enc­ing all the ter­ror that Trump has un­leashed on America and the world would be go­ing through all that and not sal­vaging any­thing out of the wreck­age.

That’s what I want to talk to you about to­day: the post-Amer­i­can Internet we can wrest from Trump’s chaos.

A post-Amer­i­can Internet that is pos­si­ble be­cause Trump has mo­bi­lized new coali­tion part­ners to join the fight on our side. In pol­i­tics, coali­tions are every­thing. Any time you see a group of peo­ple sud­denly suc­ceed­ing at a goal they have been fail­ing to achieve, it’s a sure bet that they’ve found some coali­tion part­ners, new al­lies who don’t want all the same thing as the orig­i­nal forces, but want enough of the same things to fight on their side.

That’s where Trump came from: a coali­tion of bil­lion­aires, white na­tion­al­ists, Christian big­ots, au­thor­i­tar­i­ans, con­spir­a­to­ri­al­ists, im­pe­ri­al­ists, and self-de­scribed “libertarians” who’ve got such a scorch­ing case of low-tax brain worms that they’d vote for Mussolini if he’d promise to lower their taxes by a nickel.

And what’s got me so ex­cited is that we’ve got a new coali­tion in the War on General Purpose Computers: a coali­tion that in­cludes the dig­i­tal rights ac­tivists who’ve been on the lines for decades, but also peo­ple who want to turn America’s Big Tech tril­lions into bil­lions for their own econ­omy, and na­tional se­cu­rity hawks who are quite rightly wor­ried about dig­i­tal sov­er­eignty.

My the­sis here is that this is an un­stop­pable coali­tion. Which is good news! For the first time in decades, vic­tory is in our grasp.

So let me ex­plain: 14 years ago, I stood in front of this group and ex­plained the “War on General Purpose Computing.” That was my snappy name for this fight, but the bor­ing name that they use in leg­is­la­tures for it is “anticircumvention,”

Under an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law, it’s a crime to al­ter the func­tion­ing of a dig­i­tal prod­uct or ser­vice, un­less the man­u­fac­turer ap­proves of your mod­i­fi­ca­tion, and — cru­cially — this is true whether or not your mod­i­fi­ca­tion vi­o­lates any other law.

Anticircumvention law orig­i­nates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 es­tab­lishes a felony pun­ish­able by a five year prison sen­tence and a $500,000 fine for a first of­fense for by­pass­ing an “access con­trol” for a copy­righted work.

So prac­ti­cally speak­ing, if you de­sign a de­vice or ser­vice with even the flim­si­est of sys­tems to pre­vent mod­i­fi­ca­tion of its ap­pli­ca­tion code or firmware, it’s a felony — a jail­able felony — to mod­ify that code or firmware. It’s also a felony to dis­close in­for­ma­tion about how to by­pass that ac­cess con­trol, which means that pen-testers who even de­scribe how they ac­cess a de­vice or sys­tem face crim­i­nal li­a­bil­ity.

Under an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law any man­u­fac­turer can triv­ially turn their prod­uct into a no-go zone, crim­i­nal­iz­ing the act of in­ves­ti­gat­ing its de­fects, crim­i­nal­iz­ing the act of re­port­ing on its de­fects, and crim­i­nal­iz­ing the act of re­me­di­at­ing its de­fects.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model.” Anticircumvention be­came the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA. But be­fore you start snick­er­ing at those stu­pid Americans, know this: every other coun­try in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

Now, it makes a cer­tain twisted sense for the US to en­act a law like this, af­ter all, they are the world’s tech pow­er­house, home to the biggest, most pow­er­ful tech com­pa­nies in the world. By mak­ing it il­le­gal to mod­ify dig­i­tal prod­ucts with­out the man­u­fac­tur­er’s per­mis­sion, America en­hances the rent-ex­tract­ing power of the most valu­able com­pa­nies on US stock ex­changes.

But why would Europe pass a law like this? Europe is a mas­sive tech im­porter. By ex­tend­ing le­gal pro­tec­tion to tech com­pa­nies that want to steal their users’ data and money, the EU was fa­cil­i­tat­ing a one-way trans­fer of value from Europe to America. So why would Europe do this?

Well, let me tell you about the cir­cum­stances un­der which other coun­tries came to en­act their an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion laws and maybe you’ll spot a pat­tern that will an­swer this ques­tion.

Australia got its an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law through the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Australia to en­act an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law.

Canada and Mexico got it through the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to en­act an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion laws.

Andean na­tions like Chile got their an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion laws through bi­lat­eral US free trade agree­ments, which oblige them to en­act an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion laws.

And the Central American na­tions got their an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion laws through CAFTA — The Central American Free Trade Agreement with the USA — which obliges them to en­act an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion laws, too.

I as­sume you’ve spot­ted the pat­tern by now: the US trade rep­re­sen­ta­tive has forced every one of its trad­ing part­ners to adopt an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law, to fa­cil­i­tate the ex­trac­tion of their own peo­ple’s data and money by American firms. But of course, that only raises a fur­ther ques­tion: Why would every other coun­try in the world agree to let America steal its own peo­ple’s money and data, and block its do­mes­tic tech sec­tor from mak­ing in­ter­op­er­a­ble prod­ucts that would pre­vent this theft?

Here’s an anec­dote that un­rav­els this rid­dle: many years ago, in the years be­fore Viktor Orban rose to power, I used to guest-lec­ture at a sum­mer PhD pro­gram in po­lit­i­cal sci­ence at Budapest’s Central European University. And one sum­mer, af­ter I’d lec­tured to my stu­dents about an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law, one of them ap­proached me.

They had been the in­for­ma­tion min­is­ter of a Central American na­tion dur­ing the CAFTA ne­go­ti­a­tions, and one day, they’d re­ceived a phone-call from their trade ne­go­tia­tor, call­ing from the CAFTA bar­gain­ing table. The ne­go­tia­tor said, “You know how you told me not to give the Americans an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion un­der any cir­cum­stances? Well, they’re say­ing that they won’t take our cof­fee un­less we give them an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion. And I’m sorry, but we just can’t lose the US cof­fee mar­ket. Our econ­omy would col­lapse. So we’re go­ing to give them an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion. I’m re­ally sorry.”

That’s it. That’s why every gov­ern­ment in the world al­lowed US Big Tech com­pa­nies to de­clare open sea­son on their peo­ple’s pri­vate data and ready cash.

The al­ter­na­tive was tar­iffs. Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’ve got tar­iffs now!

I mean, if some­one threat­ens to burn your house down un­less you fol­low their or­ders, and then they burn your house down any­way, you don’t have to keep fol­low­ing their or­ders. So…Happy Liberation Day?

So far, every coun­try in the world has had one of two re­sponses to the Trump tar­iffs. The first one is: “Give Trump every­thing he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops be­ing mad at you.” This has been an ab­solute fail­ure. Give Trump an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll take fuck­ing Greenland. Capitulation is a fail­ure.

But so is the other tac­tic: re­tal­ia­tory tar­iffs. That’s what we’ve done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I’m Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tar­iffs on the stuff we im­port from America, mak­ing the things we buy more ex­pen­sive. That’s a weird way to pun­ish America! It’s like punch­ing your­self in the face as hard as you can, and hop­ing the down­stairs neigh­bor says “Ouch!”

And it’s in­dis­crim­i­nate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that be­gins and ends with a vowel with tar­iffs on his soy­beans. That guy never did any­thing bad to Canada.

But there’s a third pos­si­ble re­sponse to tar­iffs, one that’s just sit­ting there, beg­ging to be tried: what about re­peal­ing an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law?

If you’re a tech­nol­o­gist or an in­vestor based in a coun­try that’s re­pealed its an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law, you can go into busi­ness mak­ing dis­en­shit­ti­fi­ca­tory prod­ucts that plug into America’s de­fec­tive tech ex­ports, al­low­ing the peo­ple who own and use those prod­ucts to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the com­pa­ny’s share­hold­ers mad.

Think of John Deere trac­tors: when a farmer’s John Deere trac­tor breaks down, they are ex­pected to re­pair it, swap­ping in new parts and as­sem­blies to re­place what­ev­er’s malf­ing. But the trac­tor won’t rec­og­nize that new part and will not start work­ing again, not un­til the farmer spends a cou­ple hun­dred bucks on a ser­vice call­out from an of­fi­cial John Deere trac­tor re­pair rep, whose only job is to type an un­lock code into the trac­tor’s con­sole, to ini­tial­ize the part and pair it with the trac­tor’s main com­put­ing unit.

Modding a trac­tor to by­pass this ac­ti­va­tion step vi­o­lates an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law, mean­ing farm­ers all over the world are stuck with this ripoff garbage, be­cause their own gov­ern­ment will lock up any­one who makes a trac­tor mod that dis­ables the parts-pair­ing check in this American prod­uct.

So what if Canada re­pealed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012 (that’s our an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law)? Well, then a com­pany like Honeybee, which makes trac­tor front-ends and at­tach­ments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo com­puter sci­ence grads, and put ’em to work jail­break­ing the John Deere trac­tor’s firmware, and of­fer it to every­one in the world. They could sell the crack to any­one with an in­ter­net con­nec­tion and a pay­ment method, in­clud­ing that poor American farmer whose soy­beans we’re cur­rently tar­iff­ing.

It’s hard to con­vey how much money is on the table here. Take just one ex­am­ple: Apple’s App Store. Apple forces all app ven­dors into us­ing its pay­ment proces­sor, and charges them a 30 per­cent com­mis­sion on every euro spent in­side of an app.

30 per­cent! That’s such a prof­itable busi­ness that Apple makes $100 bil­lion per year on it. If the EU re­peals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could re­verse-en­gi­neer Apple’s boot­load­ers and make a hard­ware don­gle that jail­breaks phones so that they can use al­ter­na­tive app stores, and sell the don­gle — along with the in­fra­struc­ture to op­er­ate an app store — to any­one in the world who wants to go into busi­ness com­pet­ing with Apple for users and app ven­dors.

Those com­peti­tors could of­fer a 90% dis­count to every crafter on Etsy, every per­former on Patreon, every on­line news out­let, every game dev, every me­dia store. Offer them a 90% dis­count on pay­ments, and still make $10b/year.

Maybe Finland will never see an­other Nokia, but Nokia’s a tough busi­ness to be in. You’ve got to make hard­ware, which is ex­pen­sive and risky. But if the EU le­gal­izes jail­break­ing, then Apple would have to in­cur all the ex­pense and risk of mak­ing and field­ing hard­ware, while those Finnish geeks could cream off the $100b Apple sucks out of the global econ­omy in an act of a dis­gust­ing, rip-off rent-seek­ing.

As Jeff Bezos said to the pub­lish­ers: “Your mar­gin is my op­por­tu­nity.” With these guys, it’s al­ways “disruption for thee, but not for me.” When they do it to us, that’s progress. When we do it to them, it’s piracy, and every pi­rate wants to be an ad­mi­ral.

Well, screw that. Move fast and break Tim Cook’s things. Move fast and break kings!

It’s funny: I spent 25 years get­ting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative (in my de­fense, it was­n’t a fair fight). I de­vel­oped a kind of grudg­ing ad­mi­ra­tion for the skill with which the USTR bound the en­tire world to a sys­tem of trade that con­ferred parochial ad­van­tages to America and its tech firms, giv­ing them free rein to loot the world’s data and economies. So it’s been pretty amaz­ing to watch Trump swiftly and de­ci­sively dis­man­tle the global sys­tem of trade and de­stroy the case for the world con­tin­u­ing to arrange its af­fairs to pro­tect the in­ter­ests of America’s cap­i­tal class.

I mean, it’s not a path I would have cho­sen. I’d have pre­ferred no Trump at all to this break­through. But I’ll take this mas­sive own-goal if Trump in­sists. I mean, I’m not say­ing I’ve be­come an ac­cel­er­a­tionist, but at this point, I’m not ex­actly not an ac­cel­er­a­tionist.

Now, you might have heard that gov­ern­ments around the world have been try­ing to get Apple to open its App Store, and they’ve to­tally failed at this. When the EU hit Apple with an en­force­ment or­der un­der the Digital Markets Act, Apple re­sponded by of­fer­ing to al­low third party app stores, but it would only al­low those stores to sell apps that Apple had ap­proved of.

And while those stores could use their own pay­ment proces­sors, Apple would charge them so much in junk fees that it would be more ex­pen­sive to process a pay­ment us­ing your own sys­tem, and if Apple be­lieved that a user’s phone had been out­side of the EU for 21 days, they’d re­motely delete all that user’s data and apps.

When the EU ex­plained that this would not sat­isfy the reg­u­la­tion, Apple threat­ened to pull out of the EU. Then, once every­one had fin­ished laugh­ing, Apple filed more than a dozen bull­shit ob­jec­tions to the or­der hop­ing to tie this up in court for a decade, the way Google and Meta did for the GDPR.

It’s not clear that the EU can force Apple to write code that opens up the iOS plat­form for al­ter­na­tive app stores and pay­ment meth­ods, but there is one thing that the EU can ab­solutely do with 100% re­li­a­bil­ity, any time they want: the EU can de­cide not to let Apple use Europe’s courts to shut down European com­pa­nies that de­fend European mer­chants, per­form­ers, mak­ers, news out­lets, game devs and cre­ative work­ers, from Apple’s ripoff, by jail­break­ing phones.

All the EU has to do is re­peal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and, in so do­ing, strip Apple of the priv­i­lege of mo­bi­liz­ing the European jus­tice sys­tem to shore up Apple’s hun­dred bil­lion dol­lar an­nual tax on the world’s dig­i­tal econ­omy. The EU com­pany that fig­ures out how to re­li­ably jail­break iPhones will have cus­tomers all over the world, in­clud­ing in the USA, where Apple does­n’t just use its veto over which apps you can run on your phone to suck 30% out of every dol­lar you spend, but where Apple also uses its con­trol over the plat­form to strip out apps that pro­tect Apple’s cus­tomers from Trump’s fas­cist takeover.

Back in October, Apple kicked the “ICE Block” app out of the App Store. That’s an app that warns the user if there’s a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby look­ing to grab you off the street and send you to an off­shore gu­lag. Apple in­ter­nally clas­si­fied ICE kid­nap­pers as a “protected class,” and then de­clared the ICE Block in­fringed on the rights of these poor, be­set ICE goons.

And speak­ing of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qual­i­fied tech­nol­o­gists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE pla­toon look­ing to put them and their chil­dren into a camp. Those skilled hack­ers are now liv­ing all over the world, joined by in­vestors who’d like to back a busi­ness whose suc­cess will be de­ter­mined by how awe­some its prod­ucts are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.

Apple’s mar­gin could be their op­por­tu­nity.

Legalizing jail­break­ing, raid­ing the high­est mar­gin lines of busi­ness of the most prof­itable com­pa­nies in America is a much bet­ter re­sponse to the Trump tar­iffs than re­tal­ia­tory tar­iffs.

For one thing, this is a tar­geted re­sponse: go af­ter Big Tech’s mar­gins and you’re mount­ing a frontal as­sault on the busi­nesses whose CEOs each paid a mil­lion bucks to sit be­hind Trump on the in­au­gu­ra­tion dais.

Raiding Big Tech’s mar­gins is not an at­tack on the American peo­ple, nor on the small American busi­nesses that are ripped off by Big Tech. It’s a raid on the com­pa­nies that screw every­day Americans and every­one else in the world. It’s a way to make every­one in the world richer at the ex­pense of these ripoff com­pa­nies.

It beats the shit out of blow­ing hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars build­ing AI data-cen­ters in the hopes that some­day, a sec­tor that’s lost nearly a tril­lion dol­lars ship­ping de­fec­tive chat­bots will fig­ure out a use for GPUs that does­n’t start he­m­or­rhag­ing money the minute they plug them in.

So here are our new al­lies in the war on gen­eral-pur­pose com­pu­ta­tion: busi­nesses and tech­nol­o­gists who want to make bil­lions of dol­lars raid­ing Big Tech’s mar­gins, and pol­i­cy­mak­ers who want their coun­try to be the dis­en­shit­ti­fi­ca­tion na­tion — the coun­try that does­n’t merely pro­tect its peo­ple’s money and pri­vacy by buy­ing jail­breaks from other coun­tries, but rather, the coun­try that makes bil­lions of dol­lars sell­ing that pri­vacy and pock­et­book-de­fend­ing tech to the rest of the world.

That’s a pow­er­ful al­liance, but those are not the only al­lies Trump has pushed into our camp. There’s an­other pow­er­ful ally wait­ing in the wings.

Remember last June, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague is­sued an ar­rest war­rant for the géno­cidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump de­nounced the ICC, and then the ICC lost its Outlook ac­cess, its email archives, its work­ing files, its ad­dress books, its cal­en­dars?

Microsoft says they did­n’t brick the ICC — that it’s a co­in­ci­dence. But when it comes to a he-said/​Clippy-said be­tween the jus­tices of the ICC and the con­victed mo­nop­o­lists of Microsoft, I know who I be­lieve.

This is ex­actly the kind of in­fra­struc­tural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese com­pa­nies like Huawei sup­ply our crit­i­cal tele­coms equip­ment. Virtually every gov­ern­ment min­istry, every ma­jor cor­po­ra­tion, every small busi­ness and every house­hold in the world have locked them­selves into a US-based, cloud-based ser­vice.

The hand­ful of US Big Tech com­pa­nies that sup­ply the world’s ad­min­is­tra­tive tools are all vul­ner­a­ble to pres­sure from the Trump ad­min, and that means that Trump can brick an en­tire na­tion.

The at­tack on the ICC was an act of cy­ber­war­fare, like the Russian hack­ers who shut down Ukrainian power-gen­er­a­tion fa­cil­i­ties, ex­cept that Microsoft does­n’t have to hack Outlook to brick the ICC — they own Outlook.

Under the US CLOUD Act of 2018, the US gov­ern­ment can com­pel any US-based com­pany to dis­close any of its users’ data — in­clud­ing for­eign gov­ern­ments — and this is true no mat­ter where that data is stored. Last July, Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France, told a French gov­ern­ment in­quiry that he “couldn’t guar­an­tee” that Microsoft would­n’t hand sen­si­tive French data over to the US gov­ern­ment, even if that data was stored in a European data-cen­ter.

And un­der the CLOUD Act, the US gov­ern­ment can slap gag or­ders on the com­pa­nies that it forces to cough up that data, so there’d be no way to even know if this hap­pened, or whether it’s al­ready hap­pened.

It does­n’t stop at ad­min­is­tra­tive tools, ei­ther: re­mem­ber back in 2022, when Putin’s thugs looted mil­lions of dol­lars’ worth of John Deere trac­tors from Ukraine and those trac­tors showed up in Chechnya? The John Deere com­pany pushed an over-the-air kill sig­nal to those trac­tors and bricked ’em.

John Deere is every bit as po­lit­i­cally vul­ner­a­ble to the Trump ad­min as Microsoft is, and they can brick most of the trac­tors in the world, and the trac­tors they can’t brick are prob­a­bly made by Massey Ferguson, the num­ber-two com­pany in the ag-tech car­tel, which is also an American com­pany and just as vul­ner­a­ble to po­lit­i­cal at­tacks from the US gov­ern­ment.

Now, none of this will be news to global lead­ers. Even be­fore Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC they were try­ing to fig­ure out a path to “digital sov­er­eignty.” But the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s out­ra­geous con­duct and rhetoric over past 11 months has turned “digital sov­er­eignty” from a nice-to-have into a must-have.

So fi­nally, we’re see­ing some move­ment, like “Eurostack,” a pro­ject to clone the func­tion­al­ity of US Big Tech si­los in free/​open source soft­ware, and to build EU-based data-cen­ters that this code can run on.

But Eurostack is head­ing for a cri­sis. It’s great to build open, lo­cally hosted, au­ditable, trust­wor­thy ser­vices that repli­cate the use­ful fea­tures of Big Tech, but you also need to build the ad­ver­sar­ial in­ter­op­er­abil­ity tools that al­low for mass ex­port­ing of mil­lions of doc­u­ments, the sen­si­tive data-struc­tures and edit his­to­ries.

We need scrap­ers and head­less browsers to ac­com­plish the ad­ver­sar­ial in­ter­op­er­abil­ity that will guar­an­tee on­go­ing con­nec­tiv­ity to in­sti­tu­tions that are still hosted on US cloud-based ser­vices, be­cause US com­pa­nies are not go­ing to fa­cil­i­tate the mass ex­o­dus of in­ter­na­tional cus­tomers from their plat­form.

Just think of how Apple re­sponded to the rel­a­tively mi­nor de­mand to open up the iOS App Store, and now imag­ine the ther­monu­clear foot-drag­ging, tantrum-throw­ing and ma­li­cious com­pli­ance they’ll come up with when faced with the de­par­ture of a plu­ral­ity of the busi­nesses and gov­ern­ments in a 27-nation bloc of 500,000,000 af­flu­ent con­sumers.

Any se­ri­ous at­tempt at dig­i­tal sov­er­eignty needs mi­gra­tion tools that work with­out the co­op­er­a­tion of the Big Tech com­pa­nies. Otherwise, this is like build­ing hous­ing for East Germans and lo­cat­ing it in West Berlin. It does­n’t mat­ter how great the hous­ing is, your in­tended au­di­ence is go­ing to re­ally strug­gle to move in un­less you tear down the wall.

Step one of tear­ing down that wall is killing an­ti­cir­cum­ven­tion law, so that we can run vir­tual de­vices that can be scripted, break boot­load­ers to swap out firmware and gen­er­ally seize the means of com­pu­ta­tion.

So this is the third bloc in the dis­en­shit­ti­fi­ca­tion army: not just dig­i­tal rights hip­pies like me; not just en­tre­pre­neurs and eco­nomic de­vel­op­ment wonks rub­bing their hands to­gether at the thought of trans­form­ing American tril­lions into European bil­lions; but also the na­tional se­cu­rity hawks who are 100% jus­ti­fied in their ex­treme con­cern about their coun­try’s re­liance on American plat­forms that have been shown to be to­tally un­re­li­able.

This is how we’ll get a post-Amer­i­can in­ter­net: with an un­stop­pable coali­tion of ac­tivists, en­tre­pre­neurs and nat­sec hawks.

This has been a long time com­ing. Since the post-war set­tle­ment, the world has treated the US as a neu­tral plat­form, a trust­wor­thy and sta­ble main­tainer of crit­i­cal sys­tems for global in­ter­change, what the po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call the “Underground Empire.” But over the past 15 years, the US has sys­tem­at­i­cally shat­tered global trust in its in­sti­tu­tions, a process that only ac­cel­er­ated un­der Trump.

Take transoceanic fiber op­tic ca­bles: the way the transoceanic fiber routes were planned, the ma­jor­ity of these ca­bles make land­fall on the coasts of the USA where the in­ter­con­nec­tions are han­dled. There’s a good case for this hub-and-spoke net­work topol­ogy, es­pe­cially com­pared to es­tab­lish­ing di­rect links be­tween every coun­try. That’s an Order(N^2) prob­lem: di­rectly link­ing each of the planet Earth’s 205 coun­tries to every other coun­try would re­quire 20,910 fiber links.

But putting all the world’s tele­coms eggs in America’s bas­ket only works if the US does­n’t take ad­van­tage of its cen­tral­ity, and while many peo­ple wor­ried about what the US could do with the head-ends of the world’s global fiber in­fra, it was­n’t un­til Mark Klein’s 2006 rev­e­la­tions about the NSA’s na­tion-scale fiber op­tic taps in AT&T’s net­work, and Ed Snowden’s 2013 doc­u­ments show­ing the global scale of this wire­tap­ping, that the world had to con­front the un­de­ni­able re­al­ity that the US could not be trusted to serve as the world’s fiber hub.

It’s not just fiber. The world does busi­ness in dol­lars. Most coun­tries main­tain dol­lar ac­counts at the Fed in New York as their ma­jor source of for­eign re­serves. But in 2005, American vul­ture cap­i­tal­ists bought up bil­lions of dol­lars worth of Argentinian gov­ern­ment bonds af­ter the sov­er­eign na­tion of Argentina had de­clared bank­ruptcy.

They con­vinced a judge in New York to turn over the gov­ern­ment of Argentina’s US as­sets to them to make good on loans that these debt col­lec­tors had not is­sued, but had bought up at pen­nies on the dol­lar. At that mo­ment, every gov­ern­ment in the world had to con­front the re­al­ity that they could not trust the US Federal Reserve with their for­eign re­serves. But what else could they use?

Without a clear an­swer, dol­lar dom­i­nance con­tin­ued, but then, un­der Biden, Putin-aligned oli­garchs and Russian firms lost ac­cess to the SWIFT sys­tem for dol­lar clear­ing. This is when goods — like oil — are priced in dol­lars, so that buy­ers only need to find some­one who will trade their own cur­rency for dol­lars, which they can then swap for any com­mod­ity in the world.

Again, there’s a sound case for dol­lar clear­ing: it’s just not prac­ti­cal to es­tab­lish deep, liq­uid pair­wise trad­ing mar­ket for all of the world’s nearly 200 cur­ren­cies, it’s an­other O(N^2) prob­lem.

But it only works if the dol­lar is a neu­tral plat­form. Once the dol­lar be­comes an in­stru­ment of US for­eign pol­icy — whether or not you agree with that pol­icy — it’s no longer a neu­tral plat­form, and the world goes look­ing for an al­ter­na­tive.

No one knows what that al­ter­na­tive’s go­ing to be, just as no one knows what con­fig­u­ra­tion the world’s fiber links will end up tak­ing. There’s kilo­me­ters of fiber be­ing stretched across the ocean floor, and coun­tries are try­ing out some pretty im­prob­a­ble gam­bits as dol­lar al­ter­na­tives, like Ethiopia revalu­ing its sov­er­eign debt in Chinese ren­minbi. Without a clear al­ter­na­tive to America’s en­shit­ti­fied plat­forms, the post-Amer­i­can cen­tury is off to a rocky start.

But there’s one post-Amer­i­can sys­tem that’s easy to imag­ine. The pro­ject to rip out all the cloud con­nected, back­doored, un­trust­wor­thy black boxes that power our in­sti­tu­tions, our med­ical im­plants, our ve­hi­cles and our trac­tors; and re­place it with col­lec­tively main­tained, open, free, trust­wor­thy, au­ditable code.

This pro­ject is the only one that ben­e­fits from economies of scale, rather than be­ing par­a­lyzed by ex­po­nen­tial crises of scale. That’s be­cause any open, free tool adopted by any pub­lic in­sti­tu­tion — like the Eurostack ser­vices — can be au­dited, lo­cal­ized, pen-tested, de­bugged and im­proved by in­sti­tu­tions in every other coun­try.

It’s a com­mons, more like a sci­ence than a tech­nol­ogy, in that it is uni­ver­sal and in­ter­na­tional and col­lab­o­ra­tive. We don’t have du­el­ing west­ern and Chinese prin­ci­ples of struc­tural en­gi­neer­ing. Rather, we have uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ples for mak­ing sure build­ings don’t fall down, adapted to lo­cal cir­cum­stances.

We would­n’t tol­er­ate se­crecy in the cal­cu­la­tions used to keep our build­ings up­right, and we should­n’t tol­er­ate opac­ity in the soft­ware that keeps our trac­tors, hear­ing aids, ven­ti­la­tors, pace­mak­ers, trains, games con­soles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and gov­ern­ment min­istries work­ing.

The thing is, soft­ware is not an as­set, it’s a li­a­bil­ity. The ca­pa­bil­i­ties that run­ning soft­ware de­liv­ers — au­toma­tion, pro­duc­tion, analy­sis and ad­min­is­tra­tion — those are as­sets. But the soft­ware it­self? That’s a li­a­bil­ity. Brittle, frag­ile, for­ever break­ing down as the soft­ware up­stream of it, down­stream of it, and ad­ja­cent to it is up­dated or swapped out, re­veal­ing de­fects and de­fi­cien­cies in sys­tems that may have per­formed well for years.

Shifting soft­ware to com­mons-based pro­duc­tion is a way to re­duce the li­a­bil­ity that soft­ware im­poses on its mak­ers and users, bal­anc­ing out that li­a­bil­ity among many play­ers.

Now, ob­vi­ously, tech bosses are to­tally clue­less when it comes to this. They re­ally do think that soft­ware is an as­set. That’s why they’re so fuck­ing horny to have chat­bots shit out soft­ware at su­per­hu­man speeds. That’s why they think it’s good that they’ve got a chat­bot that “produces a thou­sand times more code than a hu­man pro­gram­mer.”

Posts with neg­a­tive sen­ti­ment av­er­age 35.6 points on Hacker News. The over­all av­er­age is 28 points. That’s a 27% per­for­mance pre­mium for neg­a­tiv­ity.

This find­ing comes from an em­pir­i­cal study I’ve been run­ning on HN at­ten­tion dy­nam­ics, cov­er­ing de­cay curves, pref­er­en­tial at­tach­ment, sur­vival prob­a­bil­ity, and early-en­gage­ment pre­dic­tion. The preprint is avail­able on SSRN. I al­ready had a gut feel­ing. Across 32,000 posts and 340,000 com­ments, nearly 65% reg­is­ter as neg­a­tive. This might be a fea­ture of my clas­si­fier be­ing mis­cal­i­brated to­ward neg­a­tiv­ity; yet the pat­tern holds across six dif­fer­ent mod­els.

I tested three trans­former-based clas­si­fiers (DistilBERT, BERT Multi, RoBERTa) and three LLMs (Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 3.1 24B, Gemma 3 12B). The dis­tri­b­u­tions vary, but the neg­a­tive skew per­sists across all of them (inverted scale for 2-6). The re­sults I use in my dash­board are from DistilBERT be­cause it runs ef­fi­ciently in my Cloudflare-based pipeline.

What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of tech­nol­ogy, skep­ti­cism to­ward an­nounce­ments, com­plaints about in­dus­try prac­tices, frus­tra­tion with APIs. The usual. It’s worth not­ing that tech­ni­cal cri­tique reads dif­fer­ently than per­sonal at­tacks; most HN neg­a­tiv­ity is sub­stan­tive rather than toxic. But, does neg­a­tiv­ity cause en­gage­ment, or does con­tro­ver­sial con­tent at­tract both neg­a­tive fram­ing and at­ten­tion? Probably some of both.

I’ll pub­lish the full code, dataset, and a dash­board for the HN archiver soon and I’m happy to send you an up­date:

Alternatively, you can also sub­scribe to the RSS feed or get up­dates on Bluesky.

Opus 4.5 is go­ing to change every­thing

If you had asked me three months ago about these state­ments, I would have said only some­one who’s never built any­thing non-triv­ial would be­lieve they’re true. Great for aug­ment­ing a de­vel­op­er’s ex­ist­ing work­flow, and com­ple­tions are pow­er­ful, but agents re­plac­ing de­vel­op­ers en­tirely? No. Absolutely not.

Today, I think that AI cod­ing agents can ab­solutely re­place de­vel­op­ers. And the rea­son that I be­lieve this is Claude Opus 4.5.

And by “normal”, I mean that it is not the nor­mal AI agent ex­pe­ri­ence that I have had thus far. So far, AI Agents seem to be pretty good at writ­ing spaghetti code and af­ter 9 rounds of copy / paste er­rors into the ter­mi­nal and “fix it” have prob­a­bly de­stroyed my code­base to the ex­tent that I’ll be throw­ing this whole chat ses­sion out and there goes 30 min­utes I’m never get­ting back.

Opus 4.5 feels to me like the model that we were promised - or rather the promise of AI for cod­ing ac­tu­ally de­liv­ered.

One of the tough­est things about writ­ing that last sen­tence is that the im­me­di­ate re­sponse from you should be, “prove it”. So let me show you what I’ve been able to build.

I first no­ticed that Opus 4.5 was dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent when I used it to build a Windows util­ity to right-click an im­age and con­vert it to dif­fer­ent file types. This was ba­si­cally a one shot build af­ter ask­ing Opus the best way to add a right-click menu to the file ex­plorer.

What amazed me through the process of build­ing this was Opus 4.5 abil­ity to get most things right on the first try. And if it ran into er­rors, it would try and build us­ing the dot­net CLI, read the er­rors and it­er­ate un­til fixed. The only is­sue I had was Opus in­abil­ity to see XAML er­rors, which I used Visual Studio to see and copy / paste back into the agent.

Opus built a site for me to dis­trib­ute it and han­dled the bundling of the ex­e­cutable so as to use a pow­er­shell script for the in­stall, unin­stall. It also built the GitHub Actions which do the re­lease and up­date the land­ing page so that all I have to do is push source.

The only place I had to use other tools was for the logo - where I used Figma’s AI to gen­er­ate a bunch of dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions - but then Opus wrote the scripts to con­vert that SVG to the right for­mats for icons, even store dis­tri­b­u­tion if I chose to do so.

Now this is ad­mit­tedly not a com­plex ap­pli­ca­tion. This is a small Windows util­ity that is do­ing ba­si­cally one thing. It’s not like I asked Opus 4.5 to build Photoshop.

Except I kind of did.

I was so im­pressed by Opus 4.5 work on this util­ity that I de­cided to make a sim­ple GIF record­ing util­ity sim­i­lar to LICEcap for Mac. Great app, ques­tion­able name.

But that proved to be so easy, that I went ahead and con­tin­ued adding fea­tures, in­clud­ing cap­tur­ing and edit­ing video, sta­tic im­ages, adding shapes, crop­ping, blurs and more. I’m still work­ing on this ap­pli­ca­tion as it turns out build­ing a full on im­age/​video ed­i­tor is kind of a big un­der­tak­ing. But I got REALLY far in a mat­ter of hours. HOURS, PEOPLE.

I don’t have a fancy land­ing page for this one yet, but you can view all of the source code here.

I re­al­ized that if I could build a video record­ing app, I could prob­a­bly build any­thing at all - at least UI-wise. But the achilles heel of all AI agents is when they have to glue to­gether back­end sys­tems - which any real world ap­pli­ca­tion is go­ing to have - auth, data­base, API, stor­age.

Except Opus 4.5 can do that too.

Armed with my con­fi­dence in Opus 4.5, I took on a pro­ject that I had built in React Native last year and fin­ished for Android, but gave up in the fi­nal stretches (as one does).

The ap­pli­ca­tion is for my wife who owns a small yard sign fran­chise. The prob­lem is that she has a Facebook page for the busi­ness, but never posts there be­cause it’s time con­sum­ing. But any good small busi­ness has a vi­brant page where peo­ple can see pho­tos of your busi­ness do­ing…what­ever the heck it does. So peo­ple know that it exsits and is alive and well.

The idea is sim­ple - each time she sets up a yard sign, she takes a pic­ture to send to the per­son who or­dered it so they can see it was setup. So why not have a mo­bile app where she can up­load 10 im­ages at a time, and the app will use AI to gen­er­ate cap­tions and then sched­ule them and post them over the com­ing week.

It’s a sim­ple premise, but it has a lot of mov­ing parts - there is the Facebook au­then­ti­ca­tion which is a ca­per in and of it­self - not for the faint of heart. There is au­then­ti­ca­tion with a back­end, there is file stor­age for pho­tos that are sched­uled to go out, there is the back­end process which needs to post the photo. It’s a full on back­end setup.

As it turns out, I needed to in­stall some blinds in the house so I thought - why don’t I see if Opus 4.5 can build this while I in­stall the blinds.

So I fired up a chat ses­sion and just started by telling Opus 4.5 what I wanted to build and how it would rec­om­mend han­dling the back­end. It rec­om­mended sev­eral op­tions but set­tled on Firebase. I’m not now nor have I ever been a Firebase user, but at this point I trust Opus 4.5 a lot. Probably too much.

So I cre­ated a Firebase ac­count, up­graded to the Blaze plan with alerts for billing and Opus 4.5 got to work.

By the time I was done in­stalling blinds, I had a func­tional iOS ap­pli­ca­tion for us­ing AI to cap­tion pho­tos and post­ing them on a sched­ule to Facebook.

When I say that Opus 4.5 built this al­most en­tirely, I mean it. It used the fire­base CLI to stand up any re­sources it needed and would tag me in for cer­tain things like up­grad­ing a pro­ject to the Blaze plan for fea­tures like stor­age, etc. The best part was that when the Firebase cloud func­tions would throw er­rors, it would au­to­mat­i­cally grep those logs, find the er­ror and re­solve it. And all it needed was a CLI. No MCP Server. No fancy prompt file telling it how to use Firebase.

And of course, since it’s solved, I had Opus 4.5 cre­ate a back­end ad­min dash­board so I could see what she’s got pend­ing and make any ad­just­ments.

And since it did in a few hours what had taken me two months of work in the evenings in­stead of be­ing a de­cent hus­band, I de­cided to make up for my dere­lic­tion of du­ties by build­ing her an­other app for her sign busi­ness that would make her life just a bit more de­light­ful - and elim­i­nate two other apps she is cur­rently pay­ing for.

This app parses or­ders from her busi­ness Gmail ac­count to show her what sign se­tups / pick­ups she has for the day, cal­cu­lates how long its go­ing to take to go to each stop, cal­cu­lates the op­ti­mal route when there is more than one stop and tracks drive time for tax pur­poses. She was pre­vi­ously us­ing two paid apps for the last two fea­tures there.

This app also uses Firebase. Again, Opus one-shot­ted the Google auth email in­te­gra­tion. This is the kind of thing that is painstak­ingly mis­er­able by hand. And again, Firebase is so well suited here be­cause Opus knows how to use the Firebase CLI so well. It needs zero in­struc­tion.

BUT YOU DON’T KNOW HOW THE CODE WORKS

No I don’t. I have a vague idea, but you are right - I do not know how the ap­pli­ca­tions are ac­tu­ally as­sem­bled. Especially since I don’t know Swift at all.

This used to be a ma­jor hangup for me. I could­n’t di­ag­nose prob­lems when things went side­ways. With Opus 4.5, I haven’t hit that wall yet—Opus al­ways fig­ures out what the is­sue is and fixes its own bugs.

The real ques­tion is code qual­ity. Without un­der­stand­ing how it’s built, how do I know if there’s du­pli­ca­tion, dead code, or poor pat­terns? I used to ob­sess over this. Now I’m less wor­ried that a hu­man needs to read the code, be­cause I’m gen­uinely not sure that they do.

Why does a hu­man need to read this code at all? I use a cus­tom agent in VS Code that tells Opus to write code for LLMs, not hu­mans. Think about it—why op­ti­mize for hu­man read­abil­ity when the AI is do­ing all the work and will ex­plain things to you when you ask?

What you don’t need: vari­able names, for­mat­ting, com­ments meant for hu­mans, or pat­terns de­signed to spare your brain.

What you do need: sim­ple en­try points, ex­plicit code with fewer ab­strac­tions, min­i­mal cou­pling, and lin­ear con­trol flow.

You are an AI-first soft­ware en­gi­neer. Assume all code will be writ­ten and main­tained by LLMs, not hu­mans. Optimize for model rea­son­ing, re­gen­er­a­tion, and de­bug­ging — not hu­man aes­thet­ics.

These cod­ing prin­ci­ples are manda­tory:

1. Structure

- Use a con­sis­tent, pre­dictable pro­ject lay­out.

- Group code by fea­ture/​screen; keep shared util­i­ties min­i­mal.

- Create sim­ple, ob­vi­ous en­try points.

- Before scaf­fold­ing mul­ti­ple files, iden­tify shared struc­ture first. Use frame­work-na­tive com­po­si­tion pat­terns (layouts, base tem­plates, providers, shared com­po­nents) for el­e­ments that ap­pear across pages. Duplication that re­quires the same fix in mul­ti­ple places is a code smell, not a pat­tern to pre­serve.

2. Architecture

- Prefer flat, ex­plicit code over ab­strac­tions or deep hi­er­ar­chies.

- Avoid clever pat­terns, metapro­gram­ming, and un­nec­es­sary in­di­rec­tion.

- Minimize cou­pling so files can be safely re­gen­er­ated.

3. Functions and Modules

- Keep con­trol flow lin­ear and sim­ple.

- Use small-to-medium func­tions; avoid deeply nested logic.

- Pass state ex­plic­itly; avoid glob­als.

4. Naming and Comments

- Use de­scrip­tive-but-sim­ple names.

- Comment only to note in­vari­ants, as­sump­tions, or ex­ter­nal re­quire­ments.

5. Logging and Errors

- Emit de­tailed, struc­tured logs at key bound­aries.

- Make er­rors ex­plicit and in­for­ma­tive.

6. Regenerability

- Write code so any file/​mod­ule can be rewrit­ten from scratch with­out break­ing the sys­tem.

- Prefer clear, de­clar­a­tive con­fig­u­ra­tion (JSON/YAML/etc.).

7. Platform Use

- Use plat­form con­ven­tions di­rectly and sim­ply (e.g., WinUI/WPF) with­out over-ab­stract­ing.

8. Modifications

- When ex­tend­ing/​refac­tor­ing, fol­low ex­ist­ing pat­terns.

- Prefer full-file rewrites over mi­cro-ed­its un­less told oth­er­wise.

9. Quality

- Favor de­ter­min­is­tic, testable be­hav­ior.

- Keep tests sim­ple and fo­cused on ver­i­fy­ing ob­serv­able be­hav­ior.

Your goal: pro­duce code that is pre­dictable, de­bug­gable, and easy for fu­ture LLMs to rewrite or ex­tend.

All of that said, I don’t have any proof that this prompt makes a dif­fer­ence. I find that Opus 4.5 writes pretty solid code no mat­ter what you prompt it with. However, be­cause mod­els like to write code WAY more than they like to delete it, I will at points run a prompt that looks some­thing like this…

Check your LLM, AI cod­ing prin­ci­ples and then do a com­pre­hen­sive search of this ap­pli­ca­tion and sug­gest what we can do to refac­tor this to bet­ter align to those prin­ci­ples. Also point out any code that can be deleted, any files that can be deleted, things that should read should be re­named, things that should be re­struc­tured. Then do a write up of what that looks like. Kind of keep it high level so that it’s easy for me to read and not too com­plex. Add sec­tions for high, medium and lower pri­or­ity And if some­thing does­n’t need to be changed, then don’t change it. You don’t need to change things just for the sake of chang­ing them. You only need to change them if it helps bet­ter align to your LLM AI cod­ing prin­ci­ples. Save to a mark­down file.

And you get a doc­u­ment that has high, medium and low pri­or­ity items. The high ones you can deal with and the AI will stop find­ing them. You can refac­tor your pro­ject a mil­lion times and it will keep find­ing medium/​low pri­or­ity refac­tors that you can do. An AI is never ever go­ing to pass on the op­por­tu­nity to gen­er­ate some text.

I use a sim­i­lar prompt to find se­cu­rity is­sues. These you have to be very care­ful about. Where are the API keys? Is lo­gin han­dled cor­rectly? Are you stor­ing sen­si­tive val­ues in the data­base? This is prob­a­bly the most man­ual part of the pro­ject and frankly, some­thing that makes me the most ner­vous about all of these apps at the mo­ment. I’m not 100% con­fi­dent that they are bul­let proof. Maybe like 80%. And that, as they say, is too damn low.

I don’t know if I feel ex­hil­a­rated by what I can now build in a mat­ter of hours, or de­pressed be­cause the thing I’ve spent my life learn­ing to do is now triv­ial for a com­puter. Both are true.

I un­der­stand if this post made you an­gry. I get it - I did­n’t like it ei­ther when peo­ple said “AI is go­ing to re­place de­vel­op­ers.” But I can’t dis­miss it any­more. I can wish it weren’t true, but wish­ing does­n’t change re­al­ity.

But for every­thing else? Build. Stop wait­ing to have all the an­swers. Stop try­ing to fig­ure out your place in an AI-first world. The an­swer is the same as it al­ways was: make things. And now you can make them faster than you ever thought pos­si­ble.

Just make sure you know where your API keys are.

Disclaimer: This post was writ­ten by a hu­man and edited for spelling, gram­mer by Haiku 4.5

1. C Is Best

2. Why Isn’t SQLite Coded In An Object-Oriented Language?

C Is Best

Note: Sections 2.0 and 3.0 of this ar­ti­cle were added in re­sponse

to com­ments on

Hacker News and

Reddit.

Since its in­cep­tion on 2000-05-29, SQLite has been im­ple­mented in generic C. C was and con­tin­ues to be the best lan­guage for im­ple­ment­ing a soft­ware li­brary like SQLite. There are no plans to re­code SQLite in any other pro­gram­ming lan­guage at this time.

The rea­sons why C is the best lan­guage to im­ple­ment SQLite in­clude:

An in­ten­sively used low-level li­brary like SQLite needs to be fast. (And SQLite is fast, see Internal Versus External BLOBs and

35% Faster Than The Filesystem for ex­am­ples.)

C is a great lan­guage for writ­ing fast code. C is some­times de­scribed as “portable as­sem­bly lan­guage”. It en­ables de­vel­op­ers to code as close to the un­der­ly­ing hard­ware as pos­si­ble while still re­main­ing portable across plat­forms.

Other pro­gram­ming lan­guages some­times claim to be “as fast as C”. But no other lan­guage claims to be faster than C for gen­eral-pur­pose pro­gram­ming, be­cause none are.

Nearly all sys­tems have the abil­ity to call li­braries writ­ten in C. This is not true of other im­ple­men­ta­tion lan­guages.

So, for ex­am­ple, Android ap­pli­ca­tions writ­ten in Java are able to in­voke SQLite (through an adap­tor). Maybe it would have been more con­ve­nient for Android if SQLite had been coded in Java as that would make the in­ter­face sim­pler. However, on iPhone ap­pli­ca­tions are coded in Objective-C or Swift, nei­ther of which have the abil­ity to call li­braries writ­ten in Java. Thus, SQLite would be un­us­able on iPhones had it been writ­ten in Java.

Libraries writ­ten in C do not have a huge run-time de­pen­dency. In its min­i­mum con­fig­u­ra­tion, SQLite re­quires only the fol­low­ing rou­tines from the stan­dard C li­brary:

In a more com­plete build, SQLite also uses li­brary rou­tines like mal­loc() and free() and op­er­at­ing sys­tem in­ter­faces for open­ing, read­ing, writ­ing, and clos­ing files. But even then, the num­ber of de­pen­den­cies is very small. Other “modern” lan­guages, in con­trast, of­ten re­quire multi-megabyte run­times loaded with thou­sands and thou­sands of in­ter­faces.

The C lan­guage is old and bor­ing. It is a well-known and well-un­der­stood lan­guage. This is ex­actly what one wants when de­vel­op­ing a mod­ule like SQLite. Writing a small, fast, and re­li­able data­base en­gine is hard enough as it is with­out the im­ple­men­ta­tion lan­guage chang­ing out from un­der you with each up­date to the im­ple­men­ta­tion lan­guage spec­i­fi­ca­tion.

Why Isn’t SQLite Coded In An Object-Oriented Language?

Some pro­gram­mers can­not imag­ine de­vel­op­ing a com­plex sys­tem like SQLite in a lan­guage that is not “object ori­ented”. So why is SQLite not coded in C++ or Java?

Libraries writ­ten in C++ or Java can gen­er­ally only be used by ap­pli­ca­tions writ­ten in the same lan­guage. It is dif­fi­cult to get an ap­pli­ca­tion writ­ten in Haskell or Java to in­voke a li­brary writ­ten in C++. On the other hand, li­braries writ­ten in C are callable from any pro­gram­ming lan­guage.

Object-Oriented is a de­sign pat­tern, not a pro­gram­ming lan­guage. You can do ob­ject-ori­ented pro­gram­ming in any lan­guage you want, in­clud­ing as­sem­bly lan­guage. Some lan­guages (ex: C++ or Java) make ob­ject-ori­ented eas­ier. But you can still do ob­ject-ori­ented pro­gram­ming in lan­guages like C.

Object-oriented is not the only valid de­sign pat­tern. Many pro­gram­mers have been taught to think purely in terms of ob­jects. And, to be fair, ob­jects are of­ten a good way to de­com­pose a prob­lem. But ob­jects are not the only way, and are not al­ways the best way to de­com­pose a prob­lem. Sometimes good old pro­ce­dural code is eas­ier to write, eas­ier to main­tain and un­der­stand, and faster than ob­ject-ori­ented code.

When SQLite was first be­ing de­vel­oped, Java was a young and im­ma­ture lan­guage. C++ was older, but was un­der­go­ing such grow­ing pains that it was dif­fi­cult to find any two C++ com­pil­ers that worked the same way. So C was def­i­nitely a bet­ter choice back when SQLite was first be­ing de­vel­oped. The sit­u­a­tion is less stark now, but there is lit­tle to no ben­e­fit in re­cod­ing SQLite at this point.

There has lately been a lot of in­ter­est in “safe” pro­gram­ming lan­guages like Rust or Go in which it is im­pos­si­ble, or is at least dif­fi­cult, to make com­mon pro­gram­ming er­rors like mem­ory leaks or ar­ray over­runs. So the ques­tion of­ten arises as to why SQLite is not coded in a “safe” lan­guage.

None of the safe pro­gram­ming lan­guages ex­isted for the first 10 years of SQLite’s ex­is­tence. SQLite could be re­coded in Go or Rust, but do­ing so would prob­a­bly in­tro­duce far more bugs than would be fixed, and it may also re­sult in slower code.

Safe lan­guages in­sert ad­di­tional ma­chine branches to do things like ver­ify that ar­ray ac­cesses are in-bounds. In cor­rect code, those branches are never taken. That means that the ma­chine code can­not be 100% branch tested, which is an im­por­tant com­po­nent of SQLite’s qual­ity strat­egy.

Safe lan­guages usu­ally want to abort if they en­counter an out-of-mem­ory (OOM) sit­u­a­tion. SQLite is de­signed to re­cover grace­fully from an OOM. It is un­clear how this could be ac­com­plished in the cur­rent crop of safe lan­guages.

All of the ex­ist­ing safe lan­guages are new. The de­vel­op­ers of SQLite ap­plaud the ef­forts of com­puter lan­guage re­searchers in try­ing to de­velop lan­guages that are eas­ier to pro­gram safely. We en­cour­age these ef­forts to con­tinue. But we our­selves are more in­ter­ested in old and bor­ing lan­guages when it comes to im­ple­ment­ing SQLite.

All that said, it is pos­si­ble that SQLite might one day be re­coded in Rust. Recoding SQLite in Go is un­likely since Go hates as­sert(). But Rust is a pos­si­bil­ity. Some pre­con­di­tions that must oc­cur be­fore SQLite is re­coded in Rust in­clude:

Rust needs to ma­ture a lit­tle more, stop chang­ing so fast, and

move fur­ther to­ward be­ing old and bor­ing.

Rust needs to demon­strate that it can be used to cre­ate gen­eral-pur­pose

li­braries that are callable from all other pro­gram­ming lan­guages.

Rust needs to demon­strate that it can pro­duce ob­ject code that

works on ob­scure em­bed­ded de­vices, in­clud­ing de­vices that lack

an op­er­at­ing sys­tem.

Rust needs to pick up the nec­es­sary tool­ing that en­ables one to

do 100% branch cov­er­age test­ing of the com­piled bi­na­ries.

Rust needs a mech­a­nism to re­cover grace­fully from OOM er­rors.

Rust needs to demon­strate that it can do the kinds of work that

C does in SQLite with­out a sig­nif­i­cant speed penalty.

If you are a “rustacean” and feel that Rust al­ready meets the pre­con­di­tions listed above, and that SQLite should be re­coded in Rust, then you are wel­comed and en­cour­aged to con­tact the SQLite de­vel­op­ers pri­vately and ar­gue your case.

This page was last up­dated on 2025-05-09 15:56:17Z

The Gmail app, on the App Store, is cur­rently 760.7 MB in size. It is in the top three most bloated

apps out of the top 100 free apps. I don’t use it on my phone, but I was prompted to com­pare it with the seem­ingly hefty one I (have to) use, Outlook, while clear­ing up some stor­age space. Its measly 428 MB size pales in com­par­i­son.

This is­n’t new. In 2017, Axios

re­ported

that the top iPhone apps had been tak­ing up an in­creas­ing amount of space over the pe­riod from 2013 to 2017. For most of that pe­riod, the size of the Gmail app hov­ered around 12 MB, with a sud­den jump to more than 200 MB near the start of 2017. Other pop­u­lar apps also saw a 10x or more in­crease in size over the same pe­riod.

Gmail is­n’t even the worst of­fender, it’s just a more pop­u­lar one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each. So is Samsung’s SmartThings app. What about Google’s other pop­u­lar apps? Google Home is an­other hefty one, at 630 MB, that I used for its re­mote fea­ture, which I re­placed with Google TV at al­most a tenth the size. Their other pop­u­lar apps av­er­age around 250

MB in size. This seems tame in com­par­i­son to Microsoft, with an av­er­age app size of around

330MB. For ref­er­ence, the av­er­age size of an app in the top 100 free apps is 280

MB or, in a more ex­panded set (including games), 200MB.

Just to put this into per­spec­tive, on my de­vice, apps (excluding their data) use up 35 GB, and the data is an­other 35 GB. iOS takes up an­other 25 GB. Let’s say, 100 GB for apps, data and the OS. That leaves me with 20 GB (leaving a mar­gin of free space for up­dates) meant to be used for cap­tur­ing 4K video and high-qual­ity pho­tos (why else get an iPhone), and stor­ing mu­sic (don’t even think about loss­less). The re­al­ity is that run­ning out of space also slows things down, since most of my pho­tos need to be fetched from the cloud be­fore view­ing them, and I need to re-down­load these hefty of­floaded apps when I need them again. And good luck if you have a lim­ited data bun­dle.

Maybe this does­n’t mat­ter. The lat­est iPhones start at 256 GB, and surely I’ll have plenty of space when I get a new one (although I re­mem­ber say­ing this when I up­graded to 64 GB from 32 GB). It’s not re­ally about the space though. These apps don’t have 50x or even 10x the func­tion­al­ity. But now they’re 100x larger, and prob­a­bly slower. Why?

Also, can some­one ex­plain why Microsoft Authenticator is 150 MB to show 6-digit codes?

It’s not clear if this is specif­i­cally an iOS prob­lem. I don’t have an Android de­vice and I could not find a way to get that in­for­ma­tion from the Play Store with­out a de­vice. That said, I checked the size of Gmail on some­one’s Android phone, and it’s around 185 MB, which cer­tainly seems much bet­ter.

And if you’re con­sid­er­ing switch­ing from the de­fault apps, this is what the in­stalled size (which dif­fers slightly from the App Store size) is of the al­ter­na­tives on my iPhone run­ning iOS 26.2:

So, why is the Gmail app al­most 80x the size of the na­tive Mail app? My guess is as good as yours.

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