VW paid "$14.7 billion to settle civil charges in the United States" and was ordered "to pay a $2.8 billion criminal fine for 'rigging diesel-powered vehicles to cheat on government emissions tests'."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

"Seems low" and "cost of doing business" - paraphrasing any thread about US company. Could also says "VW should be sued out of existence".

Also I genuinely think those fines were low.

The fact that it did not seem to stunt their growth speaks for itself:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VWAGY/volkswagen-a...

European companies get fined the same as any other companies.

Well within the constraints they set out which exclude a hell of a lot of European companies.

(I am in Europe for reference, this is not an external perspective)

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights shows breakdown by country, type, industry sector. "Highest fines: individual" top 10 list is all international companies (Meta, Amazon, TikTok, LinkedIn, Uber) and those make the news. Smaller European companies hardly make the news.

What constraints? And which companies are excluded by them?

Are you excluding military weapons from technology? I wonder what kid of extinction are you thinking of, probably climate change but I don't think that possibility will lead to humanity extinction.

He's referring to specific uses of technology as in AI, not the summary headline The Grauniad used. That my nature excludes 99.99% of everything that goes boom at the moment.

Worth noting this is the old web site of Hans Summers of QRP Labs fame... https://qrp-labs.com

You sound like the guy I just had to fire after blowing his toes off several times.

If you think you are obsolete or faster than anyone else with these tools then you only naive enough to have lost your objectivity to the marketing. I deal with real risk and failures from the output of ChatGPT which have serious financial consequences. The first victim is always the developer, then the tester.

At best, it is very good at ousting people who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a damn computer.

You're still doing it the hard way. I just use Handbrake.

Pick a hammer, not a shitty hammer factory to assemble bits of hammer.

How do you use handbrake to write a script that uses ffmpeg?

Yep. Everything is exactly two models away. It's the new fusion. Yet after $X billion expenditure I still have to argue with the finest turd squeezed out of the industry over simple things that a trained monkey could work out.

The whole thing is propped up on faith, hype and investment capital. Now I work in the latter and we're not impressed.

Edit: As for X, removing it from my existence was an improvement in mental health for sure.

That is one really, really impressive monkey. If it were true. Probably just a bad description of reality.

Monkey as a synonym of a completely fungible creature.

Because JSON is fucking horrible for humans?

If there's anything I want to read it's searchable paper.

>Because JSON is fucking horrible for humans?

It's better than XML at least.

JSON has never been better than XML. People are just terrible at XML and don't want to learn.

You could say the same thing about assembly language.

No you couldn't. Totally different domain.

"People are just terrible at C++ and don't want to learn."

That too.

Having spent an uncomfortable and expensive night in a foreign hospital after creating my own personal fatberg, this sounds like a technological innovation that would bring tears of joy rather than stress to my eyes.

anyone with kidney stones would be interested as well

Maybe give my arteries a quick scrape while you’re in there.

Oh yeah been there too. Imagine the day you could beam them out!

That is absolutely hilarious and amazing. I love the effort people put into things like this.

This is exactly the sort of reaction I was hoping to inspire.

Like I said in my Show HN story, this is clearly a ridiculous and more or less completely useless application (probably even if you work for ISS Environmental Control and Life Support System), but it really is kind of amazing that this is possible in the first place, and didn't even involve all that much effort apart from the obvious newbie hurdles like "how in the hell am I supposed to do XYZ in Xcode?"