edent

"Up to death" would provide a perverse incentive for people to kill creators in order to liberate something from copyright.

OP here. If you're interested, here are my thoughts on Google Glass from 12 years ago.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/quick-thoughts-on-google-gl...

I am looking forward to 2028 matching the hype of 2014.

OP here! Thanks for replying.

To take, for example, calculators. I can't find any evidence of a massive influx of hyperbolic articles talking about how the calculator will change everything. With bikes, there were plenty of articles decrying how women would get "bicycle face" but very little in terms of endless coverage about them being miracle technology.

People adopted bikes and calculators and electricity because they were useful. Car manufacturers didn't have to force GPS into vehicles - customers demanded it.

The narrative I'm describing is how hype sometimes (possibly often) fizzles out. My contention is the more a technology is hyped, the less useful it will turn out to be.

Now, excuse me while I ride my Segway into the sunset while drinking a nice can of Prime.

Yes. And, again, they look amazing and make you feel like you're 10x.

But then I look at the code quality, hideous mistakes, blatant footguns, and misunderstood requirements and realise it is all a sham.

I know, I know. I'm holding it wrong. I need to use another model. I have to write a different Soul.md. I need to have true faith. Just one more pull on the slot machine, that'll fix it.

That's the most recent time. But I've bounced around all the LLMs - they're all superficially amazing. But if you understand their output they often wrong in both subtle and catastrophic ways.

As I said, maybe I'm wrong. I hope you have fun using them.

Yes! More blogging :-)

That sounds like an interesting article. You should write it.

I spent an hour with Gemini this morning trying to get instructions to compile a common open source tool for an uncommon platform.

It was an hour of pasting in error messages and getting back "Aha! Here's the final change you need to make!"

Underwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it.

But, even if I'm wrong, we were told that COBOL would make programming redundant. Then UML was going to accelerate development. Visual programming would mean no more mistakes.

All of them are in the coding mix somewhere, and I suspect LLMs will be.

The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype.

MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train.

Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything.

I'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype.

Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.

OP here. Unless you're still watching Quibi on your curved TV, delivered via WiMax then, yeah, I'd say it was pretty bloody substantiated.

I like technology. I made a decent living from it. But if I had chased every hyped fad that was promised as the next big thing, I doubt I'd be as happy as I am now.

Because when you're a kid, your mum restocks the fridge "automatically".

So much of modern tech is developed by slightly pathetic men wanting their mummies to come back and run their lives. Fill the fridge, vacuum the home, drive them to their friends, deliver perfectly cooked food, etc.

OP here. As the meme goes, I am one of literally dozens of people who live outside the USA.

"Immigration" is the commonly used term in the UK. See https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/question/99775/eurostar... and https://www.heathrow.com/arrivals/immigration-and-passports

Similarly, Australia uses the term if you want to apply for a visitor's visa - https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/

You'll also notice that the original report was written by an EU group.

My bank sends me an alert when my card is used to make a transaction - handy for spotting fraud.

I get an alert when a payment comes it - handy for knowing if a client has paid.

I can quickly check my balance - handy for knowing if I can afford another round of drinks.

I can repay a friend in two taps - handy if they've paid for dinner.

Is anything essential? No. Is it something people use multiple times per day? Yes!

Neither. They used to discover your device and then send a Bluetooth push. "Would you like to receive a file from …"

It was usually an image, movie, or audio file.

> AI just helped clean up the English

Why?

I get using a spell checker. I can see the utility in running a quick grammar check. Showing it to a friend and asking for feedback is usually a good idea.

But why would you trust a hallucinogenic plagiarism machine to "clean" your ideas?

"Warning: the Android app (including apk) is currently unavailable for download and use due to an ongoing essential security update."

No. I'm suggesting it is easier and cheaper to retrofit equipment. Not to mention dealing with the extra heat.

The Paris metro is mostly cut-and-cover. It isn't very deep. The deepest tube lines are around 60m underground.

Why is your need for silence more important than other people's need to communicate?

That isn't true. We have several turbines near us. One just across the street. Even on days without traffic noise, we can't hear them.

The one near me which is absolutely fucked, as far as I'm concerned, deserves it.

Fighty customers, crap beer, odd opening hours, and half their food menu is off ("sorry mate, we've got no cheese"). Oh, and now their credit card terminal prompts customers for a tip!

I love a good pub, but most are crap.

This isn't about the bank's security - it is about the users'.

Users are losing billions worldwide due to fraudulent apps. If a user has root and runs a malicious app, it can intercept what a legitimate banking app does. A scam app with root can draw over the screen and tell users to transfer money, or it can run a series of actions when the banking app is running, or do any of a hundred things to steal money.

Yes, but a web browser doesn't run HTML + JS as root.

The IR35 rules seemed relatively easy for me to find when I was contracting.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/off-payroll-worki...

Along with a handy tool at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/check-employment-status-for-tax

I've been running Wayland on a Framework laptop and it just works. Droves my 4K external monitor, quickly switches to single screen, does fractional scaling well, runs all my apps without complaint.

I had an old Chromebook which had Lubuntu on it - screen tearing was driving me crazy so I switched to Wayland and it is buttery smooth. No mean feat given the decrepit hardware.

I'm sure someone will be along to tell me that I'm wrong - but I've yet to experience any downsides, other than people telling me I'm wrong.

HN is very American in its puritanical approach to swearing. One of my posts had its title Bowdlerised to remove the word "disckhead"!

Someone once asked me how I found the time to read so many books. I just prefer reading to most other activities. I'd rather have my nose in a book than [your favourite activity].

It is the same with blogging. I'd rather spend time writing than I would watching YouTube, mowing the lawn, or whatever.

Although, since starting an adult gap year 12 months ago, I've actually been blogging less as I find more interesting things to do than work :-)

That's HTML. Not text.

Glad you like it :-)

OP here - sorry you got the drunk theme. That shouldn't happen by default. Had you visited my site before? Are you using an esoteric browser I might not have tested?