sefrost

In my neck of the woods, Vancouver, Canada, nothing happened to radio.

The last sports radio station in Vancouver literally closed this month!

About half of social housing in London is headed by people born outside of the country. Social housing is quite rare in the UK now after 1980s mass privatization started. It is provided at a steep rental discount and if you qualify for it you can keep it for life. Or purchase it at a steep discount.

Quite bizarre, but difficult to talk about, because it plays in to the wrong side of ongoing culture wars for some people.

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/fact-check-foreign-born-p...

Yes, I remember React Native being quite painful before Expo!

Upgrading from one version to the next especially so.

Expo seems to shield you from a lot of issues, without really taking any power away from you either.

Yes for any slightly non-standard web UI components I either tell the LLM to search the web and find examples or I provide them myself.

Usually the ones I provide myself are better than the ones they find themselves.

I'm not super clear how they search the web or what they do and don't have access to. It seems to be quite fast.

https://archive.is/pFoYO

You're right, I should!

Main blocker is I am using apps like Conductor and have lots of plates spinning at once. But that's on, me and I should try and start completing the last part myself.

One of the reasons they exhaust me, is that it's always "one more prompt" to get a UI correct. It's often just slightly off, but it can take 5-10 mins sometimes to rework something. It has led to me working much longer hours.

I think this is in part because I am one of the software engineers that always liked building products more than writing complex software. So, I am driven by the feeling of creating something. And I want to get the feature perfect and complete. But getting from 95%->100% done can take a long time with UI work for me.

So I work much longer hours now, unfortunately.

What would Firefox need to do to make a comeback as a web browser?

Obviously this is not it, but what could really work?

I am required to use Chrome at work. I enjoy using Safari personally because it’s well integrated with my Apple devices.

Why would I switch to Firefox? I don’t think there is anything they can do. The party is over.

Immigrating to Canada was a breeze for decades until the last 2-3 years when they started to reduce immigration numbers in response to citizen concerns.

They campaigned on reducing the net figure to below 100,000 in the 2019 election.

Instead they took it from 185,000 to 950,000.

After that, they are now polling at all time lows (17%).

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50524262

There has never been a British election where the majority votes cast have been for parties that pledged to increase immigration.

I take your FPTP point, but when has the winning party under FPTP had a manifesto commitment to increase immigration?

Let’s just face facts. We might disagree personally but a majority of people have always voted against immigration and it’s regularly a top 3 issue. Often the top issue!

I didn’t suggest either of those things.

Like I said I’m not voicing my personal opinion.

But we can look at the polling data going back decades now on this issue. People were not happy when it was 50,000 net migration. At one point it hit 950,000.

Obviously the issues that people are concerned about on housing, on transport, on education and more aren’t resolved by reducing the flow for a couple of years.

My point is simply that these feelings have existed for a long time and the government has generally gone against what the electorate have asked for. Are you prepared to concede that point?

If so, then I think blaming it on big tech is a major stretch since this all happened before they had as much command of our attention.

A) people had an issue with immigration when it was mostly from the EU as well, one of the main drivers of Brexit

B) leaving the EU did not mean that non-EU migration had to go up

C) immigration going down for one or two years doesn’t change the fact that millions of people are in the UK that most British people didn’t want to enter in the first place over a period of 15+ years

D) net immigration going down still means lots of people are entering the UK from elsewhere, while people from the same culture (ie grew up in the UK) are leaving which still changes the culture of the country

Note: I’m not saying I personally agree with any of those points but it’s clear what the issues are if you’re prepared to listen. There is opinion polling on all of this.

https://archive.is/8ATqS

Had to change the title a little to make it fit the character length.

I don’t know if that’s true for most of us, who simply work in CRUD apps. Maybe I’m in a bubble though.

Only 5% of your time is spent writing code? That sounds like a low estimate for most software engineers I work with.

May I ask if you could estimate how you spend the other 95% of the time?

I believe it’s tied to your earnings in the US though, which it isn’t in the UK.

I also have a number of qualifying years in the UK when I didn’t work, and for decades you could buy a year contribution for about £150. The payout is £12,500 per year.

There’s a reconciliation dimension that complicates that framing, at least in BC.

Yes, far better than how the UK runs its state pension system.

The Australians seem to have the best model overall though. Mandatory payments in to private investments has made them very wealthy.

The UK system takes the national insurance contributions of workers but doesn’t invest them in anything on behalf of the individual. So despite decades of payments you technically have nothing at the end and survive on the goodwill of the government and current taxpayers. That works right now because of the population pyramid.

Canada definitely has a better system than that.

I’ve tried OpenCode, Claude Code and Codex CLI. But was just shocked that Microsoft has a version I hadn’t even heard of.

Personally I got CLI fatigue and am happy with Conductor for now, but things are moving fast in this space.

I was curious why a company would still use the VS Code + Copilot sidebar method for coding, rather than something like Claude Code. Turns out there’s a GitHub Copilot CLI!

I thought I was pretty familiar with available options, but no one in my circles ever mentions this product. It doesn’t seem to have much mindshare.

Has anyone used it? What’s your experience?

https://github.com/features/copilot/cli

This must be Sun Life in the UK?

I had this experience starting a new company recently.

Every single SaaS product seemed to have a dozen onboarding floating modals that need to be dismissed. It would have been impossible to read them all. In most cases I had used the product a lot before but I simply had a new corporate email so they thought I was a new user.

So if any said anything important I wouldn’t know because I had to dismiss them all.

Is it obvious? Do you have the figures? One month of £1bn savings vs what cost over the last 20 years?

I support the roll out of renewables. I worked for a renewable energy company in the UK.

I just think a lot of consumers (industry and residential) have had to pay a very high price to get to the current situation. And lots of foreign private and other institutional (the Crown) organisations have benefitted most from this fast but expensive transition.

Does this cancel out the high energy prices people in the UK have been paying for the past decade+? Part of the reason the bills are high is because they subsidise the installation of renewable generation.

Polymarket publishes accuracy statistics

https://polymarket.com/accuracy

I switched to use LLMs exclusively since around March last year and I haven’t wrote a line of code directly since then.

I have followed the usual autocomplete > VS Code sidebar copilot > Cursor > Claude Code > some orchestrator of multiple Codex/Claude Codes.

I haven’t experienced the flow state once in this new world of LLMs. To be honest it’s been so long that I can’t even remember what it felt like.

All of the ads are gone from the stream?!

As a viewer I don’t think this is in my interest as I think they will get a lot less prestige guests now. They have interviewed some huge names recently.

This web app has very little design-wise in common with the iOS app. It doesn’t even serve the same use case.

They’ve hurt their brand here really, which is a high quality native app experience that makes sense of a lot of granular data from different sources.

GitHub going down during office hours in a large enterprise has knock on effects for hours as well. Especially if you are in a monorepo.