From TFA: "What I mean by this is that I think the act of writing code manually and having other humans review it to create useful, working software is headed for extinction."
“Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…” -- FORTRAN report, 1954 [1]
And the FORTRAN report was both right and wrong. What was meant by "coding" back then, carefully crafting machine instructions from higher level specifications, was almost entirely eliminated. It was replaced by something else, which we now call coding.
I think we have been doing that for a while already. Seems like almost every major company is using LLMs for coding internally and people dont consider that vibe coding.
Culturally, it feels like we've already speedran the pipeline of "vibe coding is using LLMs without reading the code" to "vibe coding is using LLMs for code" to "using LLMs is just a tool for coding". LLMs seems to now be mostly accepted for coding (on HN at least), the discussion has shifted to how useful and in what ways.
Yeah, but the semantic question is whether LLMs being accepted to use for coding means that the software engineer who merely instructs the LLM is thereby also "coding" (similar to how someone who merely writes Fortran, rather than machine code, is nowadays also described as "coding") or whether the only entity that is described here as "coding" is the LLM.
Big difference is that now C level management really tries to push this narrative down to our throats.
People who are writing and claiming thing like this should be held accountable for it. It is easy to try to scare developers that their job is going away. Especially for gaining attention. Currently I don't see difference between these claims and conspiracy theories...
I haven't followed the legislative process, where can I find that the eu wanted a single registry but the country pushed for national ones? Because i have never read it.
I'm not saying it's not true, it's just that it's so hard to follow these things when one is supposed to have a life as well
"According to the Händlerbund, the European Commission's proposal to abolish the requirement has been on the table since December 2025. However, discussions in the Council of the EU were suspended a few weeks ago after a majority of member states spoke out against it."
"A restricted version is currently being discussed in the European Parliament. According to this, an exemption is only to apply to micro-enterprises with up to 49 employees and an annual turnover of a maximum of 10 million euros. A first reading is scheduled for October 2026 at the earliest."
a) exempt companies with under 50 employees to not kill small business
AND
b) are okay with doing so, ie. there's little consequences from exempting companies from this
Then this is the mark of a terrible piece of legislation. What problem are we actually addressing here by creating another fee collecting, headache inducing registration regime and the 684th enforcement bureaucracy in the EU over yet another trivial consumer issue?
Yes, single use plastics aren't great. Incentivize companies to move away from them by creating positive market incentives instead of creating an anti-productive, full time packaging Stasi.
It's almost as if the people attracted to a career in government can only imagine their subjects responding to the stick, even though the carrot is often far more persuasive. This is the classic downfall of all economic central planning.
The problem with this particular topic is it's a religious one for many in the urban monoculture. They don't ultimately care about packaging waste, they care about punishment and repentance for humanity's existence. We've angered the gods and must repent via punitive measures! To incentivize good behavior is antithetical to that, even if it is more effective at actually doing the thing.
What does "positive market incentives" mean for you? My immediate thought is various subsidies, but given how those usually end up (easy money for companies spending more on lawyers than actual productive work), I'd much rather just have a tax.
The tax won't actually create the desired outcome though. In practice the tax is basically just a wealth transfer from the private sector to the state, who will use that money to dump into boomer pensions and not invest in packaging innovation.
Punitive taxation doesn't invent new technologies. Investment does.
For example, the only reason the electric car market even exists today is because of subsidies 15 years ago.
I agree subsidies can easily turn into a boondoggle, but so can the state itself given more tax money.
Ultimately, I personally think government choosing to focus time and money on this specific thing over other far more important issues is dumb (like say, the thousands of young men dying in Ukraine right now, the social welfare debt spiral, the lack of a capital markets union, the lack of any coherent military strategy, etc. etc.)
But if we're going to posture as if we actually care about this issue, we are going about the desired outcome the completely wrong way.
Meanwhile in a neighbouring conversation thread people are attacking Van Der Leyen as she's at fault for democratic member states torpedoing the good approach.
Apparently it's undemocratic when elected governments of their countries destroy a good solution and then blame others.
It's all about PR. If EU formulates the new law like they are fighting against pollution and plastic garbage, it sounds nice enough to the electorate who are content with greenwashing and won't investigate much. And 99% of population won't ever a hear a word about real issues by the sellers, to them sellers would quietly and imperceptibly start disappearing. But a direct fee sounds more like a tax hike and the same electorate ordering packages from foreign shops would definitely remember that.
It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
It shows up in the stats, citizens almost always trust EU more than their governments and want EU to have more power but all this means those local governments becoming less important and therefore no one is really pushing for it.
Fingers crossed Trump invades Greenland so things can start moving.
> It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
The lesson is the opposite: The EU needs LESS power, not more. If the member states didn't have a cartel to tyrannize their collective population, this regulation could never have happened. Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.
Nope, less power means the current situation will be the default as each country by default will have their own body and rules to govern instead of one rule and one body that handles the whole continent.
Unlike what you appear to believe Europeans are not some libertarian captured by the EU socialist, most europeans do want less wasteful and less harmful packaging.
Do most Europeans want all of their E-commerce to be only handled by American and Chinese megacorporations without local players? Because that is the effect of this regulation. Instead of a SME shipping a cardboard box, it will be Amazon or Temu.
This also negatively affects smaller trading partners, and makes (bi-lateral) trade with the EU much less appealing to them. This means that countries like Canada are less likely to maintain trade agreements which open their market to all sorts of EU goods.
No, we absolutely don't need to give more power to Orbans and other corrupt selfish pricks across Europe to line their pockets at everyones expense and the future of Europe.
> Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.
Actually they'd have no retroactive way to enforce it at all, and the most they'd be able to do would be to charge an import duty on a per-parcel basis, which would ultimately be borne by the importer.
This would be a huge improvement over the utter nonsense they're implementing!
If I were a small seller I would just ignore this, like many sellers on Temu do.
Before you get into trouble, someone must take notice that you did not register for the recipient fiefdom's protectionism racket. And if that happens, it is not sure that you really are in trouble. As with the GDPR, this kind of regulation is almost unenforcable in practice.
It is enforceable and the financial punishment is severe. There's no US’s LLC equivalent in EU, you basically only have C-Corp/Inc. equivalents (much more expensive to start and operate, both because of accounting and corporation income tax), so most small sellers in EU end up fully liable with their own wealth for the ridiculous up to 200,000€ penalties.
Chinese sellers don’t care, sure, but if you live in EU you do care.
That said while the financial penalties are in practice still not common they are chilling nevertheless.
However, EU is also now starting marketplace level enforcement, so in practice even those Chinese sellers will not be able to sell anything without registration.
> much more expensive to start and operate, both because of accounting and corporation income tax
Assumption. It depends on the country. I know in the UK I opened my limited company for £20 and there is no requirement to have an accountant prepare accounts at my size (and it's simple enough to do yourself).
Ok UK is no longer EU, but as I understand Ireland LTD, Latvia SIA, Estonia OU and Poland sp. z.o.o. are similar and can be ran as a non-resident.
You need to do double entry bookkeeping and prepare annual financial statements for all of those you've mentioned including UK.
In addition, you cannot register LTD in Ireland yourself, the Company's secretary must be a different person. So either you are now in business with a friend or you pay someone.
For any other member country you also run into a language barrier.
Polish "Sp. z o.o." has ~1150€ (5000 PLN) minimal capital requirement.
Registering entity with corporation tax requirement in any other country also means you would need to defend its tax residency (practically impossible if you don't actually do business there) or you have to pay corporation tax in the country you are actually operating in. It's doable but now you are dealing with two different tax authorities and potentially pay taxes in different currency and you can't have books in multiple currencies so get to have lots of fun.
It's much easier to just register US LLC instead at this point. However if you want to do anything physical not digital you end up having to register and do taxes in your resident country anyway. But you can avoid corporation tax at least and keep limited liability.
> It's much easier to just register US LLC instead at this point. However if you want to do anything physical not digital you end up having to register and do taxes in your resident country anyway.
How does remaining digital help here? My understanding was that you'd still be operating a foreign company so the country you reside in is able to claim taxes, regardless of what kind of business you do.
Yes, you need to pay personal income tax in your tax resident country but that's much easier than formalized bookkeeping and corporate income tax (assuming your LLC is DE which is the default). Also for other taxes like VAT you have to register for and pay those regardless of where your company is registered.
US LLC has no formal bookkeeping requirements but you still need to report distributions and contributions to IRS annually (via fax or certified letter), submit annual statements to your state (but those are just hey I'm still alive not financial statements, they are even free in some states like Montana) and maintain registered agent but that's like $50/year. It's crazy just how easy it is.
The digital part is just about what your business can realistically do without it having local or at least EU based presence in some form.
For once you'll have issues with dealing with local businesses and EU marketplaces rather than government.
For example eBay account is basically impossible without having US address and resident VPN. And you'll constantly worry about getting banned, which is already a worry even if you are legitimate local based business since they too big to have to care about customer support like most big corps.
If you're just selling software or something like that it's much easier. The more you go into physical goods or services realm the more hurdles you will have. You can't hire people for example without having a branch or similar. Same for real estate or some equipment like cars.
Also for some services every local business you invoice will potentially have tax withholding to deal with. This is in particular a problem in Poland which has the strictest tax withholding regulations.
I wasn't talking about income tax, this one is almost easy. The country you reside in can claim corporate taxes on your foreign business. You end up having to deal with bureaucracy in both places... Otherwise all freelancers would have their company in Estonia (for easiness) or the member state that has a lowest corporate tax, while living in the one that has the best social security.
Yes that was my criticism exactly, but US LLC by default has no corporate tax (unless you opt-in for some reason) while still having limited liability. It's why it's so unique.
There's no other country in the world that has anything like that.
People don't realize how insanely business friendly US is compared to rest of the world.
That’s cool I didn’t know about EURL. I have researched it before AI and must have missed it or dismissed because of the French language, so my mistake.
Sadly you can't run them as a non-resident afaik. The member state in which you resides will come after you for taxes if you operate a foreign company.
In France the micro-entrepreneur status makes you partially liable, and running a SASU/EURL does require ~200€/m of accounting.
This looks like strong evidence against the claim that local models will never be competitive, because hosted frontier lab models will always be better.
The frontier models may be better, but who cares if the last generation of models are plenty good enough for what you want to actually do?
And the best local models are quite competitive with those older lab models.
We'd end up back where we started. One reason code is slow and expensive is that programmers have to tailor the syntax to precisely satisfy the compiler. The benefit of pseudocode is that you can choose how precise or imprecise you want to express your intent.
The convenience of having the thing in your pocket or on your local machine without having to worry about a network connection, sign up, payment, privacy issues etc. cannot be beat.
The efficiency doesn't matter as long as it's good enough, because you already have the computer.
"The counterpoint is that specifications are closer to informal requirements than implementations are (and thus a mistake is easier to spot)."
I found exactly the opposite to be true when I took formal verification at university, and that was the major point that made formal specification / verification unattractive to me.
I think it very much depends on the domain. For instance, I've seen specs for floating point ops that were 1-3 pages compared to 30,000 lines of RTL. That holds pretty well for many other cases. For example, a properties like decompress(compress(x)) = x are beautifully simple compared to the details of the algorithms, and are pretty compelling correctness evidence.
Part of it may be that you need experience writing formal specifications just as you need experience writing programs; everyone has a lot of the second, but little of the first. They're related skills, but not the same. The first is a much more abstract (but also much more concise and powerful) method of reasoning. This sort of skill hasn't been taught well in CS education yet, owing to the fact that the underlying languages and tools were too niche.
Many, though I have to start with this disclaimer: I still don't fully understand why Objective-C is such a sweet spot.
One very important one is that, empirically, it showed how much of what we think we know about language design is ... shall we say ... "incomplete".
After all, Objective-C is a car-crash of a language: take some Smalltalk and jam it into C. Done. How can you write software with this? And yet NeXTStep and Cocoa/CocoaTouch, arguably the most elegant pieces of OS-level/UI-framework software ever, were written in Objective-C. And not despite of it, but because of it.
From a safety standpoint, it's hard to see how you can get worse: all the static type safety of Smalltalk (none) combined with the memory safety of C (none). And these interact.
And while it certainly is possible to use it very, very badly, in practice I haven't seen the horrors that we are supposed to get.
As an example, we got the same level of improvement from doing an Objective-C → Objective-C rewrite with Wunderlist (from WL2 to WL3) that others claim for Objective-C to Swift transitions.
Also, dynamic messaging is said to be slow, yet Objective-C programs consistently outperform the much more static Swift ones.
And of course, we all know that to do dynamic OO, you need a large runtime and better yet a VM. But it turns out that you can get much if not all of it with a tiny sliver of an extension to portable PDP-11 assembly language.
“Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…” -- FORTRAN report, 1954 [1]
And the FORTRAN report was both right and wrong. What was meant by "coding" back then, carefully crafting machine instructions from higher level specifications, was almost entirely eliminated. It was replaced by something else, which we now call coding.
[1] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusE...
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