retrac98

They’re not, they’re full time employees.

I know plenty of engineers (web application developers) making over £100-£150k outside of London, usually in fairly low-stress remote jobs.

The pay is clearly nothing compared to the US, but I wouldn’t say it was massively hard for them to get where they are. They all have 5+ years experience at a senior level, and are otherwise just reliable, capable, low-maintenance employees, but maybe that’s rare!

Pure opinion, but I feel like the UK has a strong cultural bias towards doing things the way they’ve always been done, which can make us a bit resistant to new technologies and ways of doing things.

Thanks for the clarification in the title, I was confused for a second there.

In all seriousness, nice work!

Important detail - taxes don’t really fund anything. They’re just a means to control inflation.

The government spends money and then taxes it back, not the other way around.

The point here is tax revenue isn’t a blocker to smart investments in public services… Or at least it shouldn’t be.

It seems inevitable the UK will get left behind in AI. We have a low investment, low efficiency, and low risk culture that doesn’t lend itself well to tech innovation.

Over a decade on from “mobile first” I’m always surprised at how few developers actually test their work on mobile devices.

You don’t understand climate change.

Nobody denies the climate has always changed. The issue is with human induced climate change is the rate of change.

It’s the difference between bringing a car from 100mph to a gentle stop and slamming it into a brick wall. The rate of change we’ve introduced doesn’t give ecosystems or species the time they need to adapt.

This either hasn’t been tested on a mobile device or the developer decided mobile devices weren’t important enough to properly support at launch. Bad look either way.

I’m currently building a new product with Rails in 2024.

It just feels so much more productive than anything else I’ve ever worked with.

My first thought too. Immediate tab close.

The best answer here.

But how do you know we’re not there yet? Not across the board, but isn’t it possible there’s a small yet growing portion of written content online that’s AI generated with no obvious tells?

If the AI writing is good, you’re not going to know it’s written by AI and you’ll continue to think you "can always tell" while more and more of what you read isn’t written by humans.

Great library that’s let down by its documentation. It’s very hard to figure out how to do things in Hotwire without a YouTube tutorial.

Good. I’m so sick of finding myself signed up to prime with no recollection of ever doing so.

The deactivation process is awful too - an obstacle course of dark patterns.

I wish he’d just focus on SpaceX or Tesla (the cars, not the robot).

They'll get better. Humans are far from perfect, and I have no doubt that LLMs will eventually outperform them for non-trivial tasks consistently.

There are so many applications for LLMs where having a perfect score is much more important than speed, because getting it wrong is so expensive, damaging, or time consuming to resolve for an organisation.

Doesn’t almost everyone do lots more than that anyway?

Old news. It’s been an employers market for a while now.

This “others have it worse so I'll keep quiet” attitude is part of what’s gotten the UK into the mess it’s in.

"Freddo issue" is such a perfect description.

Yes, because £60k isn’t really a middle class income anymore.

After income tax it leaves about £3,400 a month. Rent or a mortgage, council tax, energy and food will take the vast majority of that, making it very hard to build wealth and get ahead - even without kids in the mix.

"mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form"

Sounds like your average codebase.

What makes you think people without kids only care about their own gratification?

Can’t they care for others that aren’t their children? What about people without children who work for the betterment of entire communities?

This makes no sense. Why shouldn’t someone who’s going to live in a society for several more decades have a say in how it operates?

GDP isn’t a great measure here.

For example, while it’s #6 by GDP it’s #21 by GDP per capita.

The wealth is also very unevenly distributed, 1/7 are skipping meals due to poverty: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cost-of-livi...

The UK is too poor for mass EV adoption.

We have an average annual household income of something like £30k, and most electric cars (that you’d actually want) cost much more than that right now.

OSX came out way before the iPhone