alerter

You're absolutely right! This is the smoking gun.

I work for a consultancy that does vessel tracking as one of its main products, and yeah it's expensive! afaik they have remote teams with sensors at key points and a bunch of people using AI/software to manage things like GPS spoofing. So it's all pretty guarded proprietary stuff.

Great bit of topical datavis here.

Yes, this is well put. I was heavily influenced by Casey back in 2014 and the advice I give juniors now is always that first point about "getting the clowns out of the car". There's a lot of crossover with the "grug brained developer" here too, which is much more aligned with the web/enterprise world.

I find it very hard to convince people though. It runs counter to a lot of other practices in the industry, and the resulting code seems less sophisticated than an abstraction pile.

Interesting take, and there is some truth to the "practical vs ideological" split, but I feel like it's a bit mixed up here.

The actual division I see is between programmers arguing for simpler, more direct solutions to problems (e.g see Casey's blog post on semantic compression, or the hype around HTMX) and those who want to architect the "perfect" scalable and extensible system. The latter is much more common in enterprise settings, usually performs worse, and is the source of a lot of incidental complexity.

The article mentions microservices and event driven systems as an example of "pure engineering", but I think it's the exact opposite. I always see the "pure" crowd advocating for single binaries, fewer dependencies, fewer network hops, and less future-proofing.

I moved from startup to enterprise a couple of years ago. I never realised a job could be simultaneously so easy, while also being so frustrating.

It feels like there's very little commercial or technical juice, and very low standards. Frankly this became even more noticeable after the last wave of offshoring.

The "cloud sales" & "enterprise architecture" nexus has got a lot to answer for as well. There's an entire parallel ecosystem of people whose job is purely to sound impressive to non-technical stakeholders and then funnel money to AWS. Currently these guys are busy rebranding as "agentic systems" experts, just like they went from being OOP to microservices experts in the 2010s.

Probably my single favourite programming article.

Builder hired 300 internal engineers and kicked off building internal tools, all of which could have simply been purchased

Tempted to say there was a bit of corruption here, crazy decision. Like someone had connections to the contractor providing all those devs.

otoh they were an "app builder" company. Maybe they really wanted to dogfood.

Oh I totally understand that. Public sector IT is littered with failed projects, massive overspends and lasting functional problems. There are numerous examples from the last few years alone - hundreds of millions spent on broken software. I used to work in public affairs and followed a lot of those projects closely.

I don't think this means "government = bad at tech" though. You sometimes see smaller in-house teams do really good work. The biggest issue seems to be with contracting and procurement policy. For example, on the Police Scotland i6 program they hired a bunch of consultancies to write a tender document, and then hired CGI for the final project. That turned out to be a copy of the Spanish system, which turned into a huge and expensive disaster as the requirements differed.

Feels like government has a similar problem to a lot of legacy non-tech companies. They don't have much technical leadership, don't understand the problem, and decide to hand it off to the lowest bidder. Doesn't help that they are often legally obliged to act this way. But the underlying engineering problems aren't unsolvable, and don't need to become a huge mess every time. (Your point about recruitment is fair though)

Interesting, though I have no idea why the government is using AWS in the first place. This isn't a startup hacking away trying to find PMF, or dealing with unpredictable marketing-driven traffic spikes. We know we need these services running long term, and can make solid predictions about usage patterns.

We could build a public sector cloud and/or adopt a sensible on-prem approach. This requires funding, coordination and technical leadership, but would save the taxpayer an enormous amount over the long term.

Public sector IT is a disaster in general ofc, but I know there are good engineers working there.

I don't really agree with this. There may not be a mathematically perfect solution to the problem of paying artists, but that doesn't preclude criticism. Apart from anything else, Spotify isn't trying to find the fairest approach, it's trying to leverage its market dominance to increase profitability and maintain market share.

I agree that 2000 was a cleaner overall design. Adding realism for the sake of it is a dead end.

That said, there are a lot of games where the details of the simulation compound on themselves in interesting ways (Dwarf Fortress, Dominions, DC:Barbarossa, Shadow Empire, Paradox games). I enjoy those sorts of games, more minimalism and abstraction isn't always more fun.

Completely agree. I'm frustrated that Oculus and VR tech in general has been lumped in, via the "metaverse", with a bunch of less useful and less interesting crypto/NFT stuff. All I wanted was some cool niche flight and mech sims, maybe some interesting AR projects beyond what Niantic could offer. Instead, we got a bunch of ugly tech demos, outright scams, and virtual meeting rooms that nobody uses.

Being able to buy drugs online was cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the billions of dollars invested and vast amounts of carbon emitted.

I'm living in the UK (Edinburgh) and I definitely feel like everything has gotten worse. The facts - on waiting times, strike days, inflation, wage stagnation, inequality etc. - speak for themselves. But there is also just a general feeling of malaise and decay.

I will say that the large population of increasingly Facebook-addled Boomers really don't help. These are people who've paid off their mortgage, can collect rental income, are becoming pensioners, and generally vote against immigration, against public spending, and for lower tax rates. They're also massive consumers of NHS resources. We're going to be supporting these people with our taxes for decades to come. Meanwhile the Government has consistently failed to support productivity growth or infrastructure investment, and our whole economy is oriented around the service sector in London and a handful of other cities.

The only alternative prospectus (Corbyn's "Green New Deal") was trashed by the established media, and his successor is now delivering bromides about national unity and being "tough on crime". He's also put EU integration completely off the menu. Nobody in power seems to grasp the scale of the economic and demographic crisis we're facing. It's not great.

Haha yeah, I made something similar for my own use. I bet thousands of people saw the ChatGPT interface and instinctively wanted to pipe stuff / save it easily without fussing with manual copy and paste. It's still a fun project and quite rewarding to see the text stream appear in real time in your shell.

Agreed. I think the (now obviously justified) cynicism over blockchain hype has led a lot of left-leaning people to see AI as the next bubble.

It doesn't help that major non-technical consulting firms have been producing nonsense for years about the coming "fourth industrial revolution" (AI/ML, IoT, VR. self-driving etc.) These people are usually wrong.

The difference is that ChatGPT, midjourney, copilot etc. are just legitimately useful. Being able to transcribe, translate, summarise and process audio and text data is useful. Being able to generate a regex or SQL query is useful. There are obviously questions about how much closer this gets us to AGI, but the tech has inarguable utility in a way that cryptocurrencies never did.

People will complain about political correctness, but this is just the market and intellectual property law in action.

In my experience, the ‘left’ doesn’t want the public sphere to become coddled and inoffensive. Advertisers and media companies do. It’s risk aversion.

Ideally, our shared cultural legacy would not be subject to the whims of corporate executives.

I always wondered if it was a mistake for Facebook to try to rapidly casualise VR after acquiring Oculus. If they spent even a small fraction of their metaverse billions developing high-end, niche products (flight/mech sims etc.) then they could cultivate a loyal base of affluent users. It probably wouldn't be profitable by itself, but it would grow their user base and act as a nice showcase of what VR is capable of. More so than the cartoon office space vibe.

This practice led to a big defamation case involving a Scottish politician. Seems like the company involved was basically a tax avoidance scheme.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-51832504

The original Pokémon games were deep and interesting RPGs that could nevertheless be played by children. They were hugely successful because they were genuinely well crafted games. Niantic gutted mechanical complexity in the name of accessibility and monetisation.

It feels like mobile studios in general just don’t have the culture, desire or market incentives to produce products that are compelling on their own merits. Everything has to be a Skinner box with only a handful of interactions.

I know Pokémon Go was a successful fad, but I still see it as a missed opportunity.

I think it's a better way of getting VR off the ground than the "social" mass market stuff that Facebook is pursuing. The industry should focus on building high quality niche stuff first, like FPS games and flight sims, then work on broadening the appeal once the tech has matured.

This is a really great game, if you can get past the ancient interface. Has a surprisingly tight core loop and a nice, pared down approach to 'grand strategy'.

Despite all the buttons, it's actually got very little simulationist cruft going on. You're mostly making interesting decisions.

This is very interesting and, as someone currently working in political reporting/summarising, also terrifying!

Good thing I can code.