retrac98

Decisions here are made slowly, with complete information, and agreement from all parties. Once they’re made they’re then slow to change for all the same reasons.

Until this changes I don’t think Europe has any hope of competing with the US or China on anything they decide is important.

Price sensitivity doesn’t spring into existence at the point something becomes unaffordable.

Fuel (diesel, specifically) in the UK is getting towards $10/gallon, so not surprising really!

Not in every instance, but in aggregate technological progress has clearly been beneficial.

Just look at living conditions, infant mortality, life expectancy or education.

You could be anywhere on the planet relative to me and I can talk to you for free, instantaneously at any time. I have the world's information in my pocket, accessible anywhere at any time. I could go on!

Repeat ad infinitum through history. Old ways of making a living getting commoditised is just the price of technological progress.

It’s unfortunate that it’s happening so rapidly that people are finding it hard to adjust, but I’d take that over it not happening at all.

The page keeps crashing on my iPhone 17 Pro.

Been at this 10 years. My top tip is if you’re doing cold outreach, kickstart the value exchange by giving something first without asking for anything in return.

A “hey I noticed x is costing you more than it should and could be better/cheaper done like this” AND then actually give them the “this” for free without expectation of anything in return is 10x more effective than a message where you’re asking for work.

It doesn’t need to be a big give - an actionable plan for a small system improvement they can give to someone internal to implement, for example, is fine.

Another tip is to highlight the problem with a loom video/recording of some sort. That way they’ve seen and heard you too. This builds instant trust and a feeling of knowing the person behind the business straight away.

Good luck!

They don’t say how they plan to avoid a repeat scenario a few months down the line.

Donations are fine, but something needs to change or people are just propping up a non-viable business.

I’m always amazed that people don’t post pictures of development projects that are primarily visual.

I remember signing up to Netflix to watch house of cards back in the early 2010s and being absolutely blown away.

I don’t think there’s been a single show on Netflix I’ve genuinely looked forward to in the past couple of years. It’s like they completely gave up on quality content and just shovel out the most mediocre slop. I’m amazed people still pay these ever increasing prices.

A few reasons I can think of, having been through IVF twice now:

- Capability. Many couples are perfectly capable of carrying a pregnancy, they’re just having trouble conceiving.

- Cost. Surrogacy in a lot of countries is very expensive compared to IVF. Where I live in the UK, IVF is free on the NHS, or ~£8,000-£10,000 a round privately. Surrogacy can be £20,000 to £100,000 (or more), depending on the arrangement.

- Legal issues. In the UK, for example, the surrogate mother is the legal mother of the child at birth.

- Availability. Finding a surrogate can be very hard, especially in countries where commercial surrogacy is illegal. People go use surrogates abroad instead, which has its own range of issues (read up on orphaned surrogate kids in Ukraine).

- Ethical barriers. Using a surrogate involves issues of bodily autonomy. You can’t stop your surrogate smoking or drinking while pregnant, for example.

- Emotional barriers. Emotionally, motherhood starts at conception. Most mothers do not want to skip those 9 months of bonding they have with their baby prior to it being born.

My parents generation are the most screen addicted people I know. Absolute slaves to Facebook’s algorithm. It’s really disheartening to see.

The site seems to be falling over. Is that a skill or taste issue?

Wow. I’m finding it hard to even conceive of what it’d be like to have one of the frontier models on hardware at this speed.

You don’t have to, of course, but you probably will if you want to be competitive in a professional capacity in the future.

Not doing so seems a bit like a farmer ploughing fields and harvesting crops by hand while seeking to remain competitive with modern machinery, surely?

At this point, when people say this I just assume they’ve not used the latest models or haven’t invested time in learning how to use these tools properly.

There’s slop out there, yes, but in the hands of an engineer who cares to use tools well, LLMs allow you to move much more quickly and increase the quality of your output dramatically.

Unnecessary complexity isn’t much of a problem when the code is virtually free to maintain or throw away and replace.

An aside - this monitor is proving surprisingly difficult to buy in the UK. Everywhere I look it seems to be unavailable or out of stock, and I’ve been checking regularly.

Relatedly, I also don’t understand why a half-trillion dollar company makes it so hard to give them my money. There’s no option to order ASUS directly on the UK site. I’m forced to check lots of smaller resellers or Amazon.

At this point we need big names to choose to remove their services in the UK so the government gets the message.

Great idea but the whole app looks like it could be achieved with a prompt template in ChatGPT et al.

This is disappointing to hear. I was thinking of getting some HomePods to replace my Sonos system which has got progressively less reliable over the years to the point of being virtually useless now.

Are there any modern home audio setups that connect to streaming services and actually work reliably? At this point I’m thinking of just going back to an iPod and dock like it’s 2006.

If your plane had a 3.1% chance of crashing, would you get on?

Games nowadays have a real accessibility issue.

Every new game feels like I need to spend hours learning how it works before I get to having fun, when as a working parent I might only have 30 minutes here or there where I’m able to play. When I get back to a game after a couple of weeks off, I can’t remember what I was doing, or what the controls are. It’s just not fun.

Furthermore, every time I turn my console on, everything needs an update in order to be played. So there’s a 15-20 minute wait to get to any sort of entertainment.

Contrast this to the OG Xbox/PS2 era - I’d turn the console on and be having fun within a minute or two in a game that was easy to understand. I don’t think this was due to a lack of depth in the games either. They generally just seemed to have an “easy to learn, hard to master” aspect to them that doesn’t feel present today.

Obviously this is a huge generalisation. But the cumulative effect is that it’s switched me off gaming completely. Unless something is considered a true masterpiece, I won’t even bother.

My Xbox is packed away for now. I expect the next time I’ll turn it on will be for GTA 6.

I’d bet most people don’t know what a paradox is.

Sort of an aside from the article, but I never feel like these geographic averages translate well to densely populated countries like England.

The North, like all parts of the country, has pockets of extreme affluence near areas of relative poverty, with a lot of middle income households scattered about the place too.

Talking to some southerners you’d think the whole of the North was a dump, and I worry people write off a truly beautiful part of the UK because of this misconception.

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.