Luca Singels

🏳️‍🌈 26yo - 🧙🏻‍♂️ INFJ - 👨🏻‍💻 Tech Lead - A little bit of Humanity will do you no harm

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@jsteenhuisen This will have a positive impact on the chicken supply. Not everyone is a vaccine doomsayer, jeez.

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@Diamondbolt7 Disgusted

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

Music apps should have a “I don’t hate this button”.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

It's very fashionable to knock mainstream, establishment medicine

But mainstream, establishment medicine did this to life expectancy

[Daily Investor @DailyInvestorSA]

South Africa’s real GDP per capita declined from R78,437 in 2008 to R74,411 in 2023, which means South Africans became poorer over the last fifteen years.
https://t.co/bM2btXWn0l

[Jordan Fish @jwordfish]

Is anybody going to write about how Twitter is manipulating the touch target timing to do click fraud on all of its ads? It’s not an accident.

[Andreas Klinger 🦾 @andreasklinger]

This is really funny to me.

Brussels is set up as perfect scape goat by your countries and everyone buys into it.

The perfect scape goat
- all power delegated from local leaders
- by default, everything super complex with 27+ countries
- all countries wanting their edge cases to be considered
- and the actual power always stays w/ local leaders and parties

What do i mean with power stays with local politicians?
- All political campaigning is around local politics.
- You elect your local leaders.
- Your local leaders elect the president and commissioners.
- They run the councils & co.
- Even the parliament is mostly elected in context of local parties.

If inefficient, why is it kept like this?
My conspiracy theory:

So that all wins can be celebrated locally and all fails blamed on Brussels.

Anti-European people and parties mention Brussels as this "unelected omni powerful shadow government" – dude, i wish.

That way we would have only to improve one government and could even send our best policy people and politicans there.

In reality, Brussels basically a delgated debate club.

All is optimized, so that you do not have any positive emotional connection to Brussels leaders and they can stay the perfect scapegoats.

Imagine coming up with standardizing regulation but you have 27+ countries that insist on their authority, autonomy and edge cases.

Yea… it ends up complex af, but you will end up blaming Brussels for it.

Eg that GDPR law does not require cookie banners in reality is the perfect example.
It's true. You don't need them.
But there are 30+ parallel authorities over GDPR, because everyone wanted one, so who will stick their neck out? Everyone rather keeps safe by just adding banners.

Complex af by default through design.

Eg a minor one, EU HQ being in two cities (Brussels + Strasbourg) - i met nobody in Brussels who wants that - who wants that? France. It's free money.

Eg the president not being elected directly by the public - who wants that? Brussels?
The people i met would love more direct democracy. That way they could speak directly to Europeans and show how all solutions are only on European level.
Who does not want that? Your country leaders who currently hold most of the power.

The result?

People keep bashing on Brussels and EU when in reality we need more European Unifaction not less.

The biggest regulatory problem for businesses in Europe is not regulation A or B, but that by default we got 27x regulations for everything.
Plus every country got some gotcha that nobody had time to fix.

Our biggest economic competitors are way more unified and standardized across their states – USA, China, India, Russia, etc

Europe in comparison has countries with population of chinese office buildings and GDP of computer games pushing to keep everything localized and hence complex.
Hence we keep scapegoating Brussels instead of those local politicians in power.

If you want a bold way out of the current economic crisis in Europe that has a long-term chance of survival for the continent:
More standardization and unification across Europe – not less

Eg standardized tax regimes (with different rates) across Europe, centrally collected. Why not military and deftech spending also centralized. Legal code for all matters business too.

I know… sounds scary… and likely won't happen b/c local politicians wouldn't give up the power. And voters will back them up b/c they have no emotional connection to Brussels and don't trust them.
And meanwhile we have it easy and blame Brussels for the complexity problems instead of the several dozen individual parts themselves.

PS:
Am i saying Brussels is perfect? Hell no. AI Act was a good example of out-of-scope regulation done horrible. But to me this is almost a symptom of a system set up to focus on the wrong things. And if they would be the only one easier to fix.

Am I saying that they have no power? No, they decide a lot.
But the true power never leaves your member state leaders while your anger and meme hit Brussels.

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@webafrica your live chat is unusable. It takes many hours before you’re connected with an agent. By the time you see the message you’ve been disconnected from an agent and the whole thing starts again. It’s insane.

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

This years Spotify Wrapped was dog shit quality

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@SABCNews @KganyagoLesetja where’s my 50 bps

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@earthcurated @SpaceX Don’t show the flat earthers this 😂

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@LeadingReport Yeah because Trump will give him what he wants with total disregard to the will of the Ukrainian people.

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@timecaptales 110 Volts

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@elonmusk Can you stop stirring up shit. Honestly.

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

Ok hear me out. The WhatsApp call star rating but for the person you just spoke to 😂

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@appltrack @markgurman They’re going to have to kneecap the Apple TV box to make this sell.

[Nintendo Life @nintendolife]

"I Don’t Want To See It Fizzle Out” - Stardew Valley Creator On Why He Can't Give It Up. https://t.co/WDXQyJ7LiC

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@TheCineprism Loved the Silo so much. And season 2 is right around the corner!

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@MacRumors When it comes to dealing with EU regulation, they know what they’re doing and not in a good way. 0/10 execution.

[Luca Singels @lucasingels]

@MacRumors People are so mad in the comments but they just want Apple to open up. Apples tech isn’t superior because of the walled garden. It’s superior because they put effort and thought into it. Their insistence on over limiting their tech is a pure money grab and keeps people locked in.