Funny, because it's true. Not only National want that though, all political parties just happily serve themselves a good chunk of money from the tax payer for dodgy housing "entitlements" for ministers and MPs.

For my New Zealand friends - this potential, rumoured new realo-green-liberal-center party in Germany would be the equivalent of our TOP. Interesting state another MMP democracy is in. For better or worse, who knows at this stage.

This!

What 2024-26 really exposed in software engineering is that only the product and its architectural properties count, and not the handcrafted code we've used to babysit and have arguments about its formatting over. I'm saying "exposed" because it's really been always like that. Product and business folks just had no easy way to deal with this because there wasn't any good abstraction around. LLM-driven coding has given the world that new abstraction layer. I'm surprised that the reaction to the Rails keynote speech from @dhh has been what it has been, given where we are in 2026. Did and do I like coding? Yes. Is writing code by hand becoming more and more of a craft/special occasion thing? Yes. These two points do not have to mutually exclusive. I'm currently crafting a bit of C/C++ for High Performance Parallel Computing on the side for funsies and it's cool to do that for a learning experience. Would I want to work on a web app stack and still write CRUD or ORM code by hand - nope. I much rather set the architectural direction and let an agentic system do a lot of the boring work and then reason with the creation. Part of that is choosing the right tech stack and using AI smartly to build a suitable architecture from there. And frankly - even part of that will be abstracted away in the next few years when languages will matter less and less, apart from very specific use cases. If folks stay hung up on writing code by hand, they will be left behind. And maybe more software dev/language/stack communities need to be told that. The flip side is: tech communities matter, they are more than just a pool of people to hire from or the base of an online forum to talk shop or shit-post together. And these communities have created relationships and friendships between folks all over the world. If languages and stacks are not important anymore, what are the future engineering communities? Sure, there are AI meetups - generic or product specific - but they don't feel the same (yet), too high-level, too sales- and marketing-focused, IDK?

As the person whose builds have broken @philliphaydon 's TC instance this time, this bug *really* annoys me.

Would love to see the actual underlying data. There's obviously an easy way to achieve this by simply making it harder or impossible to even get and stay on a wait-list For these procedures. Not saying they have done that, but if the number is down and you can show that accordingly more of these surgeries have been done - only then you can claim success. Previous governments (of all sides) have in the past tinkered with the waiting lists to claim awesome results that were less awesome when closely inspected.

So far KDE's approach is - among the traditional Linux platforms - the best and most workable approach to AI. "Use whatever tool is appropriate but it's still your code" and no ideological dos and donts. As said many times before, each to their own - it's perfectly ok for a maintainer to reject AI-assisted or -written code. Just don't be surprised when folks go and fix stuff elsewhere in the future- or fork, I guess.

The "having to experience and live with the outcomes of your decisions" element is 💯 true. Teaches you so many good and terrible patterns.

Lol, Claude has become so useless for tech work in my view. Trying to debug an issue in the BIOS/EC of one of my laptops and get insta-blocked even on "just" Opus 5 for "cyber". Luckily there are tons of alternatives that are more open and better these days.