avastmick

Having lived in China for five years and seeing how it is done there (literally everywhere), I see this as a payment problem. There is no sensible, low cost payment infrastructure to support this safely. Instead most of the west has a fractured app ecosystem where each app ‘does payment’ rather than via a set of trusted payment apps that do the security up front and then passes to the provider. For example, in the article the photos show an anonymous QR code you’d scan with your camera, rather than in China where you’d use Alipay or WeChat, whose app you’d use to scan the QR. When I returned from China, it took a while to readjust to the heightened (and often expensive) friction of payments. Not saying scams don’t exist in China, just that the payment provider gives some guarantees on the veracity of the claim made by the QR code

I’m in a similar space. Solo working on an Edtech solution. Man it can be hard. @cjs_ac, I’d be keen to chat, if you’d have time.

I’m a solo founder/developer (https://kayshun.co) my relationship/usage of LLMs for codegen has been complicated.

At first I was all in with Copilot and various similar plugins for neovim. It helped me get going but did produce the worst code in the application. Also I found (personal preference) that the autocomplete function actually slowed me down; it made me pause or even prevented me from seeing what I was doing rather than just typing out what I needed to. I stopped using any codegen for about four months at the end of 2024; I felt it was not making me more productive.

This year it’s back on the table with avante[0] and cursor (the latter back off the table due to the huge memory requirements). Then recently Claude Code dropped and I am currently feeling like I have productivity super powers. I’ve set it up in a pair programming style (old XP coder) where I write careful specs (prompts) and tests (which I code); it writes code; I review run the tests and commit. I work with it. I do not just let it just run as I have found I waste more time unwinding its output than watching each step.

From being pretty disillusioned six months ago I can now see it as a powerful tool.

Can it replace devs? In my opinion, some. Like all things it’s garbage in garbage out. So the idea a non-technical product manager can produce quality outputs seems unlikely to me.

0: https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim

I like this view. I’m not especially successful (by any of the measures knocking about) but in the midst of a startup again for the last year. This time I work how I want to work and am actually enjoying myself. The whole 80 hours a week startup thing is padded with a lot of performance art in my experience. I am actively avoiding all that this time around. I find that I solve a lot of things by not doing them or solving them when not actively trying. We’ve made great progress so far.

I really cannot understand consciousness. And if I am honest nor do I see peoples fascination with it. Especially now that scientists are trying to measure, they seem to come up short and some posit that it must a quantum effect or something else.

I am not sure what new learning all the research and thinking brings: I am lost it all the “arguments”; I really do not understand.

A lot of way smarter people than me think it’s a worthwhile concept to wrestle with. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it.

A lot of people way smarter than me agonised over the nature of the soul too. Is it that debate replayed? Are we just trying to justify humans “specialness”?

Fairly common in Australia and New Zealand to relocate complete houses. I’ve seen them done here in NZ fully furnished.

Most houses here are wooden construction with corrugated steel roofs which keeps the weight down.

Slightly tangential is the work I did on a National digital identity platform. It enables personal information sharing from trusted sources (birth records, tax records, banks) and could simply enable true/false responses to queries such as “Are you over 18” instead of sadly spraying PI data everywhere to be lost or stolen.

We as a team worked super hard and were super proud of what the platform could do. We even won some awards. But due to politics and bureaucracy its capabilities were never used and today the service is a national joke and really only used to logon to government services. It is going to be replaced with something new and shiny.

Now, I look back and think why did I care so much and work so hard. Why was I so naive that it would be used as designed.

I have to second this. No one I know complained when it was introduced, and I saw no complaints aired in the media of any noticeable degree. We still have too much unnecessary plastic in packaging.

My wife is Irish, and they started the removal of plastic bags over 20 years ago. It was carefully phased in over time. It led to a 90% reduction in plastic bag use [0]. They also weigh your trash (in Dublin, anyway) as a means of cost pressure to reduce waste and encourage recycling. It is stated to have reduced waste by 50% [1].

[0] https://www.irishenvironment.com/iepedia/plastic-bag-levy/ [1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/why-it-pays-to-c...

My take is that it is attempting a similar “intervention” as the Agile Manifesto did, but less well thought through or phrased.

The data science/ engineering domain appears to often produce outcomes like a good deal of 1990s software projects - projects that don’t produce good or expected results [0].

I posted a counterpoint recently [1] that said we should stop approaching data engineering like software engineering. Given what appears to be an almost endless number of data projects that produce little to no value to businesses, what should data professionals do to address the problem? This manifesto at least attempts to make a statement.

[0] I contributed to many of these at the beginning of my career!

[1] https://betterprogramming.pub/data-engineering-is-not-softwa...

Isn’t this a building quality concern rather than a concern of building location and style?

I live in a townhouse with shared walls on both sides and we never hear our neighbours. I’ve asked them if they hear us (we have teenagers) and one said never, the other said sometimes an occasional thud (teenagers wrestling).

Similarly we have a private outdoor space or deck and a shared open area. Both are great and well designed. I think it can be done well.

I know too that often it is not.

Sorry cities are much more efficient than any other form of human living [0]. It is suburbs and rural sprawl that creates the energy waste. Population drift towards the latter may cause the hollowing of cities which lead to crime and transport inefficiency.

[0] https://theconversation.com/suburban-living-the-worst-for-ca...

I led the technical design team for RealMe, New Zealand’s digital identity service. Sadly, the service is woefully undervalued and poorly used. The technology is now out dated.

It was built to directly mitigate events like the Latitude breach whereby the service gives an answer to an identity question rather than spraying PII across the economy. Answers were formed by pulling data from disparate authoritative sources in real time, a set of tokens were created and an audit record created and shared with PII owner consent. No personal information was ever intended to be shared or stored. It was an elegant solution for New Zealand, though we were mindful of a potential scaling issues in larger jurisdictions.

The financial sector was the initial target to help with AML/KYC flows. The banks in particular lobbied for access to the PII rather than an answer to the question so the service was devalued from the get go. If we’d won that answer I believe that digital identity and personal information sharing would be very different today.

Honest question: is there an example in history of when a new technology led to the loss of jobs and didn’t just lead to a shift and further growth? I’ve tried to think of one, but I’m stumped.

Aligns with our experience in China for the four years before the pandemic. Apart from a couple of apartments we visited in Harbin that had gas boiler radiators, everwhere else we found apartments heated and cooled by heat pumps. It makes total sense in countries that have hot summers and cold winters.

Uric acid may be a complex symptomatic expression rather than a cause.

My own journey may reflect this. I suffered from gout and also other worrisome blood work markers that indicated metabolic syndrome. I am now largely vegan, alcohol free and avoid sugar and processed food. I have not had a gout attack for a long time. Then in a recent blood test my uric acid was through the roof. My (excellent) doctor first wanted to raise the amount of allopurinol I was taking but I suffer from side effects and was reluctant. My doctor did some research and found that uric acid levels are raised during periods of weight loss.

So it’s complicated and not well understood.

I use Teams a lot with some Zoom. I've also used all the competing tools - Slack, whatever the current Google branding gives, among others. They all kinda suck. But hang on, am I asking too much? Is this suckiness because it's hard to do well? Oh, and add in that we all need to use it, all day, every day, so _any_ friction really annoys.

Distributed, connected collaboration in real-time, at (massive) scale - it's a big functional domain. Offering video, chat, document storage, sharing and collaboration, as well as project management and integration into a plethora of other apps and tools. This is surely a hard space.

Just look at apps that inhabit much, much simpler function spaces - say, Twitter, given the start point of the discussion. It doesn't get that glare of all day, everyday work use. It doesn't have the function and criticality to people's day. Twitter is down? It's just not a thing 99.9% of people will freak out over. Post-pandemic, Teams or Zoom is down means loss of a sales, key workshops stranding participants, distributed Teams losing comms during critical releases, and the list goes on.

I agree with this; we’ve only been recently witnessing the awakening.

My view entirely: (some) people will start to see themselves as the true commodity of value and either move to where they are valued or work remotely. This is already starting to happen. The more enlightened nation states will get on the bus and compete for people resources. Those more backward thinking will seek to lock the door and regress and live increasingly in tyranny.

Just my view.

Great STEAM project for schools (who likely have the needed DVD players).

The road toll in the US is staggering given its wealth. The conversation to reduce it doesn’t obviously exist like it does in other places. The NHTSA figures showed an increase per kilometre in 2021, where many developed nations are showing a year on year reduction. Any Americans want to posit a reason why?

Not sure I can fully agree; it will just create a downward cycle. The approach doesn’t allow for excellence or gaining satisfaction through doing quality work. However, many jobs are joyless and I think it’s vicious cycle and something has to be done to address these empty of value businesses that are the typical culprits of crappy, overworked jobs.

The problem is the seemingly ubiquitous paucity of quality management - there is literally no one appreciating your effort. Many managers, right up to a CX level are so detached from the purpose of the business they manage they can’t determine whether work done good or not.

My belief is this general lack of appreciation of excellence and intrinsic disinterest in excellence is the creation of the Friedman/Welch school of business - that the purpose of a business is to maximise value to shareholders. I see this as abstract and empty. It removes any value placed on, “we create great products that out customers love,” and replaces it with the dollar reward for shareholders. Make great products everyone wants? Why bother when you can create crap products with misused staff that are cheaply produced that returns more dividends for our shareholders. If you have talent and can produce quality go somewhere where you are appreciated. If you don’t, maybe go with the Homer Simpson approach and sink those companies who equally can’t deliver.

Anecdotal and the opposite effect.

When I was a kid I used to keep lizards as pets. I quickly noticed that if I filled up the water trays with cold water it would evaporate within a day from the hot heat lamps. Hot or very warm warm out of a kettle would last much much longer. I made a study as a science experiment for school and scored badly as the teacher said it was impossible.

I lean towards this sentiment - I think the patent and copyright structures limit innovation. The concept that an idea is worth anything without successful implementation is flawed in my opinion. However, has any research been done on the actual implications of patent and copyright removal? I may be naïve in my thinking.

I agree. Those two works are an interesting takes on Victorian life from two different eras and world views. Thomas Hughes's contemporary novel was hugely popular, even until the mid to late 20th Century, as an ideal for the moral development of boys. The Flashman Papers is a satire from the late 1960s onwards that uses Tom Brown's bully, Flashman, as a device to lampoon the British Empire. Personally, I find Fraser's Flashman brilliant, an antithetical depiction of the Victorian age that was traditionally populated with military heroes and intrepid explorers that were likely to be anything but moral.

I can trump that! Maybe 1990(ish) - I worked as a cycle courier in London and one of my regular clients was Crossrail where I carried plans from one office to another.

The article is not about the fall of the Roman Empire, but about the fall of the Roman Republic and its replacement with a dictatorship under Julius Caesar. The Empire expanded after that point.

Rome was bloodily founded, with the forced subjugation of other nations and peoples across what is now Italy.

The correlation seems less about the fall to ruin, but that that somewhere like the US would fall into a dictatorship and has many ingredients as Julius Caesar served to claim emperor. I would also add a hefty amount of backwards looking rhetoric also to the mix - things were better, more moral in the past; or we must address sins of the past. Putin has been using similar rhetoric to Caesar swapping the Ukraine for the Celts.

I recommend Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History on the Celtic Holocaust that poses that the whole expansion and annihilation of the Celts was a money making scheme by Julius Caesar to grasp power.

I couldn't get any location information from the page, but I wonder if these are mostly rural? I live in New Zealand and while the vehicles are not seen here the makeup would seem to align with my experience - trucks (Utes as we call them), cheap old cars, or flashy cars. The problem with living rurally is that there may be no options to socialise without your car.

As the Russian military build-up and invasion of Ukraine has unfolded, I have spent more time thinking about how much humanity tolerates the concentration of significant power (or its proxy, extreme wealth) in small groups of individuals. For me, tackling this issue should be the key concern of our generation.

The smaller the set and the greater the power the set holds, the higher the risk of bad outcomes. The set is composed from human beings, therefore mental health, extremist or nihilistic tendencies will negatively affect the outcomes. Nuclear war is an existentially threatening outcome, but only one of many whose likelihood is determined by a small group of (fragile) individuals.

Why do people here think that historically the personality cult of leadership became so prevalent? And why are the existential risks of power concentration still so accepted given the evidence we see right in front of us?

From a philosophical stance, this is history repeating for the same basic reason. 2022 AD and risk of war is still the same as it was in 1022 AD, or 22 AD. That reason is the accumulation of power (or by proxy, wealth) in a small set of individuals, or in this case one person. No realtime access to information changes this; it just makes the story of the horror unfold faster.

Persisting with the concentration of power in individuals has shown throughout history to have dire consequence. We continue risking civilization on the mental health of those who already show significant issues with their obsessive clammer for power. The cult of the leader is toxic and, as far as I can see, illogical and lacking evidence for benefit.

Where are the voices that seek a structured shift away from personality cult politics? The innovation we all need for the future are those voices.

I’ve never understood why people find the force of chance so difficult to accept.

I am lucky I am a white man born in the UK in 1969. So much of what I am is due just to that fact, irrespective of whether I am smart or not, hard working or not.

This is true, particularly in developed nations. [0]

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism