leoedin

I think there's 2 separate things at play.

Most products don't require testing by a notified body. That means anyone can do the testing - or even you could do it at home. The CE mark is self-assessed - you don't have to get a lab to issue it to you.

But electronics does have to conform with various electromagnetic compatibility rules. There's effectively no way to prove that without doing EMC testing. Most non-EU manufacturers will still do EMC testing in a lab, perhaps in China. That test report becomes part of the product's technical file.

My point is that if you take a module from a 3rd party and integrate it into a larger electronic product, it no longer has the same behaviour from an EMC point of view. You have no evidence that it meets the harmonised standards for electromagnetic compatibility. Realistically, probably nobody will ever notice. But if they do, you don't have evidence that your product complies with the standard.

The population of London isn't much more today than it was in 1930. And the population density is more or less the same too. I think it's unlikely that people's bodies are the cause of heating. Greater London for example would receive about 1572 MW of solar irradiance on a sunny day.

I often wonder if they just made us do more washing, use more cups, travel further in the same time and get more expectations from our boss though.

I've got 2 kids. I'm always doing laundry and loading the dishwasher. How much of that is just higher expectations of cleanliness? Back when washing clothes involved going to the river all day, kids would get sewn into their clothes for winter. These days they have 5 outfit changes a day. I'm certain that my dishwasher means everyone just grabs a clean mug/glass/bowl rather than just rinsing a dirty one. I use a computer all day to get stuff done. But that just means my boss expects more stuff to be done. The baseline shifted.

A few hundred years ago people mostly lived near where they were born and didn't travel much. Now we get in our cars to drive a few hours to visit our family and friends. But they only moved far away because the car enabled it.

Obviously there are benefits - especially for those who find dirt upsetting - but have we actually changed the balance of leisure time very much?

In the EU (and UK with UKCA), CE certification is down to whoever makes the product available on the market. There's no get out for pre-certified modules. If you put a pre-certified module in a box and sell it, you have to be responsible for the CE mark.

You need evidence that the whole product complies with the EMC regulations. There's some judgement involved - if you put a certified circuit board in a plastic box, it won't change the EMC behaviour so you don't need to re-test. But if you solder a module onto a larger circuit board, you are almost certainly changing the EMC behaviour. You should definitely be re-testing something like that.

The pre-certified module does save you some time in the "intentional radiator" testing - assuming you use the same antenna it was tested with as a module, you can probably make the case that the behaviour is the same.

Will anyone ever notice or care for a few thousand niche devices? I doubt it. But to sell in the EU legally you do need to do that testing.

It's kind of hilarious isn't it?

"I don't even write code, yet here is my technical assessment of how a tricky software problem should work".

Ok so 99.99995% of all Mikrotik RouterOS devices do not end up in peoples labs.

Mikrotik make all sorts of equipment, including home routers. The hAP ax3 is shown on their homepage. It runs Router OS 7.

Asking RouterOS to be more like DLink or whatever it is you are more comfortable with is insane

It's not insane to ask for sane defaults or UIs which hide progressive complexity. Ubiquiti manage it far better. Teltonika manage it far better.

Networking is a hugely complex and deep field. Mikrotik make equipment targeting small businesses. There's no way your average IT person understands the tradeoffs of every configuration the device can have - which is why a sensible UI which guides you into the complexity would be good.

Perhaps Mikrotik don't have the resources to do that - fair enough, that's a business decision. But it's not insane to desire a UI which encapsulates domain knowledge in a way which guides the user. That's just good UI.

The problem with UIs like Mikrotiks, which are effectively just a graphical overlay on a config file, is that they make it very easy to make a mistake. And even seasoned IT people make mistakes. And in this case, a mistake often means a security vulnerability.

My issue with Mikrotik is that the UI puts all the complexity up front. A good UI should guide the user and reveal relevant information only as it's needed. Mikrotik doesn't do that.

For example, the most common reason I want to connect to my home router is to see what devices are connected, what their IP addresses are, and perhaps make their DHCP leases static. In a good UI that sort of common activity would be front and centre - in MikroTik it's buried under 3 levels of menu.

Under the IP menu is 26 alphabetically sorted options, of which I have to click "DHCP Server". Then the default page is to create a new DHCP server - why would I want to do that? How many users run multiple DHCP servers? I have to click on the "Leases" tab, and then I can see a list of my connected devices.

Every other home router I've used knows that users care about the connected devices, so show it front and centre.

It's not a complaint. It's a comment. That would never happen in the UK - so it's interesting to see a different approach in different countries. It's obviously higher risk - there's no door to stop someone jumping out the train. Whether it's better or worse is left to the reader to decide.

Similarly - I was once on a train in Italy which stopped at a station with platforms shorter than the train. We discovered this when we opened the door to find a big step down onto gravel. That's not something that happens in the UK.

The biggest difference of course is that the UK has much higher train doors. So an open door without a platform is very high off the ground. Perhaps that's why we have a different culture around it.

There's also something wrong with the map alignment. I think the tiles are being rendered with the wrong placement - the underlying map doesn't match reality.

Mazda managed to avoid the touch screen plague until relatively recently. Their latest models seem to have adopted Android based infotainment with touchscreens though. I've got a CX-5 that's 3 years old and it's pleasingly touch screen free. Also the driver aids are mild and unintrusive.

Excluding whatever's going on in China right now, there's just not that many small brands left. You only have to have a passing interest in cars to be aware of pretty much every global car brand - excluding high end supercars, kit car weirdness and whatever mayhem is happening in China.

I recently upgraded to a car with CarPlay, and it's actually a worse user experience than just having my phone on a really solid Brodit phone holder.

For example - when using Google Maps on my phone I can pan around the map to look at nearby places really quickly - maybe while I'm stopped at traffic lights, and then reset back to the navigation. Spotify in CarPlay is really hard to use - much harder than the normal app. Whether it plays the song you want seems to be a game of chance.

I've spoken to a lot of people outside of software development who feel this way. It's mainly a sense of "what is this for?". It's obvious that the presence of AI means everyone has to use it, but it isn't obvious yet exactly what good it will bring to most people.

Certainly in my own life it's made some things easier. But that just means I move on to the next thing quicker - the treadmill never stops. Does AI improve my life yet? I'm not so certain. It also has huge environmental costs, pushes up energy prices, pushes up computing hardware prices and sucks attention away from other things.

Is it cool? Yes. Is it likely to be society changing. Yes. Does it make anyone's lives better? TBC.

Is it a Dubai thing that everyone's parking expires unexpectedly in 2 minutes? I didn't really understand that - perhaps a lack of local knowledge.

The whole TLD is blocked by my work firewall. I imagine you don't get complaints because the few people who are blocked just don't know what you do. How would they even complain if they can't access your website?

The problem I've found is that enough people don't feel strongly about it.

I've had plenty of conversations recently where people say "yeah, but social media is harming kids. Banning it is good". People broadly see the headline "think of the children" and think, "yup, let's protect children".

To me, there's all sorts of downsides - the death of small discussion forums, pushing interesting online experiences out of the reach of teenagers, the creeping surveillance and, worst of all, the complete end of the open internet (when inevitably it doesn't actually work). But most non-tech people just don't see that.

The currently in place age verificaton system is a joke. It's trivial to circumvent them - not just via VPN, but also because there's countless websites that just don't care. The social media ban will bring more of the same - and then they'll have to ban VPNs and bring in website firewalls.

Who wins? The established tech companies, who have big enough legal departments to comply with increasing red tape. How is a new social network going to legitimately compete with Facebook now?

But when I say all this to people I know, they just don't see it. Most people are not tech people.

If you're being detained for the rest of your life while your money languishes in a hole in Timbuktu, it has been taken from you. Money is only valuable because it has utility. If you can't use it, it's not yours.

From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.

Surely that's the case for all sorts of services we pay for. Renting a house is paying for a service. The money disappears and in return you get the service. A nice landlord (and by nice I mean - responsive to problems, following laws, empathetic to the tenant, trusting of the tenant etc) provides a better service than a bad one. Unfortunately you rarely know which kind of landlord you have until you move in.

I think it's fair to say that there are bad landlords, and that there are circumstances where landlords are exploitative. But that doesn't change the fact there are also circumstances where landlords provide a useful service to people. Buying a house isn't always practical - landlords should exist to provide a service to people who don't want long term financial commitments.

There must be 10s of millions of x86 PCs with unlocked bioses in the UK. The issue won't be running an open device. The problem is software - what does someone running Linux do if the government mandates online services require proprietary attestation APIs?

It's scary how quickly the banning is moving. The problem is what happens next. When they realise that banning things doesn't really work. The next logical step is severely limiting internet traffic.

This page is kind of mad. https://mxcl.dev/homebrew/

So much repetition. I'm guessing it's targeting AI training sets? The guy really wants you to know he created Homebrew!

In the short term, compute becomes an appreciating asset.

In the medium term, everyone ramps up production. Huawei and other Chinese companies work really hard to develop in-house alternatives. At some point, the hype cycle will peak and less money will flow into datacentres (yes, this will happen. It always does. Even for technologies that change society. The bubble always bursts).

The question is not if this will happen. It will happen. It's just a question of when it happens and how big the magnitude of the cycle is.

This is such a misuse of the word poor. Have you actually been to a poor country?

The UK is poorer than the US - sure. But it's wealthier than most other countries in the world. Not just in terms of GDP per capita or average household wealth, but also in infrastructure terms - the cumulative effect of being a wealthy industrialised country for so long is a huge amount of infrastructure.

I think it's fair to say that UK wealth growth has slowed at the same time as many other countries have caught up. So the UK is no longer the leader it once was. But that's very different from saying it's a poor country. It's just not.

I think GDP per capita can also be misleading though - the GDP per capita of Luxembourg or Brunei is high, but they're such small countries that it's kind of irrelevant.

Setting aside the special cases (tiny, oil money, weird finance sectors, tax havens etc) there's basically a handful of countries which are clearly doing something right - the US, Taiwan, the north-eastern European countries (Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden). Most of the other "developed countries" are sitting in the same sort of GDP per capita range of $65-$75k. Ranking these isn't so meaningful - the difference between the UK and France is only 1.5%.

In peak covid video chat time I had a call with someone with a Portal connected to their TV. It was so much better than laptops and webcams for family videocalling. I would have bought one immediately had it not been a Meta product.

It's disappointing that 6 years later there's still no solution. The window has passed for my kids - but it would have been really nice to be able to have large format TV based video calls with the grandparents. I tried to set something up with a laptop, but it was always too janky and fiddly to work well.

I'm not convinced by this. I've had good managers and bad managers. Generally the manager isn't "doing the work", so much as setting the direction and smoothing the path. The current state of AI tools still need "good managers" to set the direction, otherwise they end up nowhere. Especially in large complex projects.

Maybe at some point the AI tooling will be good enough for me to say "do my work for me today" and sit back. At that point, yes, I am irrelevant and could be replaced by anyone else. But is it anywhere close to that right now? My experience says no.

Perhaps the current models are capable of that with the right tooling - some system to define clear goals and stick to them. I haven't seen evidence of that yet though. Have other people?

I quit AI Pro earlier this year for the same reason. I went to use it one day (I don't think I'd even used it much in the preceding week) and found that my limits had been reduced overnight and my usage was already too high. I had something like a 7 day wait until it reset.

I get you have to change limits, but reducing limits in a way which both applies retroactively and has a really long reset period is just infuriating. If they'd applied the new limits more gently or at the next billing period I'd probably have continued paying.

I don't mind paying a fair price for a service that provides value, but I really hate having a service I think I'm paying for rug-pulled with no clear justification.

Oof, yeah. I was expecting a thought piece on why the internet has turned to shit because of AI slop, and instead I got AI slop.

The internet now truly has turned to shit!

You can't just redefine useful to mean something it doesn't.

Useful = able to be used for practical purposes.

As an extreme example, most effective weapons are useful to the person using them, but aren't necessarily a net benefit.

Is AI going to make life meaningfully better for most people? That's uncertain. Is it useful for the tasks in front of me today? Yes, definitely.

This kind of breathless hyperbole is spreading everywhere. "The thing nobody's talking about" is basically never an appropriate phrase for a deeply technical article. But it's everywhere now.

I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, the AI assisted writing is probably surfacing ideas and articles that never would have been published otherwise. Either because the author isn't a great writer, or because the editing never got finished. In cases like that, maybe a bit of AI induced cliche is a price worth paying.

But on the other hand, I increasingly read half way into an article to realise that there's nothing there. It's ALL hyperbolic nothingness. It used to be that a well written article was a sign of a well thought out argument. No longer! It's made reading anything on the internet become tedious. I feel we're heading towards the death of the interesting internet at a rapid pace.

The cats out the bag though. What can we do?

extremely strong evidence that they are not in fact that useful.

Surely you can't argue in good faith today that LLMs aren't useful? It was a valid argument a year ago, but the latest models are absolutely useful at solving whole classes of problems.

They're not perfect, need to be carefully monitored, can cause weird gambling like dopamine rushes and can cause lazy development habits to creep in. But none of those things negate the fact that, in many situations, they are useful.