tomgp

This is a very accurate and concise summary of why I can't work in tech companies anymore. Recently I returned for a quick contract to develop a proof of concept app and almost immediately my stress levels whent through the roof. Just the whole thing is a recipe for erroding peoples's ability to produce anything of value.

the behaviour was already bad (sharing your personal information with 1000s of “trusted partners”), companies just want to keep doing it even if it inconveniences their users.

yes! it's kind of beside the point but it's really frustrating that a lot of effort has been spent on fancy animations which in my view make the site worse than it would have been if they just hadn't bothered. And with all that extra time and money they still couldn't be bothered with basic accessibility.

In Britain it’s noticeable that as unemployment benefit and social housing has been stripped back the proportion of people from working class backgrounds with careers in the arts has declined. The most visible example of this is probably actors; pretty much all the current generation of British actors went to public school and were able to support themselves via family wealth as they became established. This wasn’t the case for the generation coming through in the 70s and 80s. The underlying cause is that if you can’t subsist as you learn your craft you can’t learn your craft, I don’t think this is mysterious.

This doesn’t just apply to the arts, if all junior dev roles are stripped away by llm’s where do the talented developers of tomorrow come from? Those who can learn the craft on their own time, those with independent wealth.

At a societal level there is a huge amount of potential talent being left on the table, and imo redistributive policies are the obvious fix. In think this is really important both from a mortal point of view and an economically pragmatic one.

This is really excellent advice.

They were resource intensive (though probably less so than yr average React based site these days) but Flash, especially post AS3, was an order of magnitude or two faster than JS + html/svg/canvas at the time. It was years after the death of Flash that standards based tech finally caught up.

I find the code genuinely inspiring. A lesson that being precious about code quality is not always the best way forward.

True, but that’s not so much a dirty secret as something cartographers will loudly and endlessly tell anyone who’ll listen within moments of meeting them

Perhaps not surprising given what we know about how e.g. satnav usage affects our navigational competence. Feels like outsourcing our reasoning and problem solving would have an analagous effect.

"Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0

Really hope Europe etc. sees the opportunity for a massive win here and invests in bringing these people over

Every single kitchen I've ever visited in the UK has a toaster and a kettle. Just because things aren't popular in the US...

On the subject of Dualit toasters: I've picked several up on the street over the years, cleaned them up and replaced a few parts (heating elements and/ or timers) and for about £10 effectively had a new toaster to give away/ sell. Dualit toasters aren't the best but I wholeheartedly recomend them from the point of view of DIY repair and maintainence. Our current model is 20 years old this year.

Even that's a pretty conservative estimate these days. It's typically less, ~11,000m (18,000km) and the balance keeps shifting in EVs favour over time as the grid becomes more renewables based... https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-21-misleading-myths-ab...

Incredible to watch this continued vandalism from across the Atlantic. It seems if there's something that Trump and his cronies can't make a quick buck off then it needs to be smashed. America, the leviathan (in the Hobbesian sense), is crippling itself, blinding itself, cutting itself off from allies. What's will be left in 4 years? Not the same country.

I remember when the Jacksonpollock.org first came online there was a bit of drama around the fact that Miltos Manetas had taken Stamen’s original Flash file (well known within the flash community at the time but not so much outside) and re-hosted it without credit or permission. They sorted it out and Stamen were credited in the end but it opened my eyes to how much of contemporary art it’s actually marketing. (With reference here to Manetas not Pollock)

Does it? I thought it just revealed the rats

Also, 4s always come in pairs facing each other

I don't understand how culture is being used here. What does "more culture" mean? A culture is a process and a system of relations I can understand how wikipedia has a culture but not how a shadow library has "more culture than you need". Are we talking about the products of cultural production? To suggest that LLMs are anywhere near human level is laughable.

Yes, sure, if it helps you to think in those terms I guess that makes sense. Being a bit reductive perhaps but I think what it comes down to is having an interest in the "why" as much as the "what" and the "how".

This reinforces for me the importance of domain knowledge in engineering leadership. i.e. if you work for a finance company you need to have a decent understanding of finance in order to make the correct technical decisions and tradeoffs, same goes for journalism, same goes for commerce etc. etc. Successful organisations I've worked for have always included domain specific, non-technical, questions to tech team interviews whilst some of the most technically acomplished teams I've worked with have floundered through a lack of domain insight.

For me Guttenberg is an actor famous for Police Academy, Short Circuit, and Three Men And A Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Guttenberg

You could perhaps reframe "blame" as identifying the source of the problem and iunderstand why it can be a useful excercise (aslo none of us here are trying to solve the problem really, just wasting time on the internet). In this case Node and it's atendant ecosystem are certainly a part of the problem but I would agree that Gatsby is a bigger part of the issue as they don't seem to have any interest in taming the Node dependecy management beast. I've had to dig into Gatsby projects mere months old and it really was like opening a can of worms.

Yeah, scanning through the recently published articles it seems "Reason" has no problem with the politicisation of science if it means the slashing of govenment funding.

It's true! Britain has no bears so we like any refrence to them to be removed from our books ensuring we never have to think about them.

thanks, and apologies if i came across harshly, I really enjoyed the article.

Not really the point BUT... I really wish people would refrain from using AI illustrations on blog posts. There are actual pictures of Church in the public domain, this illustration doesn't particularly look like him and is already appearing in image search results for the man thanks to the blog post's popularity. If the illustration has so little value that you can't be bothered to spend more than 5 minutes generating it then perhaps just leave it out?

[edit] ... and if you really must use "AI" generated imagery then at least caption it as such.

This whole thing seems petty and vindictive and will surely only damage Wordpress as a whole.

How many people would need to die each year for it to be considered extremely dangerous? Literal wars have been started over fewer deaths than the US road network racks up in a year. OK I’m being facetious but the extent to which we’ve normalised 40,000+ deaths a year really is remarkable, can you imagine the reaction if smart phones killed that many?

>it would have massive negative effect on trade and would probably cost the US far more than it would save.

I'd love to share that certainty, it's a rational position but the Republican party are fully in thrall to an ideological commitment to capture or destroy the institutions of state and can't be relied upon to behave rationally. If you think the political right won't commit economic vandalism in the name of this idiological crusade just take a look at my home, Britain, where first austerity, then Brexit, then Liz Truss's free market extremism dumpded our economy in the trash and pushed our public services to the brink.