tomgp

I think the issue is that the prose on the homepage gives off AI marketing BS "Everything you'd expect. Nothing you don't." "Native down to the pixels" etc. in an age where the web is stuffed full of low value llm generated content this is a strong negative signal for me (and i suspect others). No reflection on the app itself which I've yet to try but seems like a great idea

60 year olds have been using computers most of their working life. Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.

I think this is true, it's like a close relation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#:~:text=%5B14...

So glad you took the time to keep the site alive!

I have it on a long timer so that I have to pause for a while before the auto-complete prompt appears. I've found I tend to deliberately set things up for it to attempt when I know I'm going to have to type a bunch of boiler plate or some code that's logically straightforward but syntactically fiddly ie. I write a quick comment describing what the next few lines should do and then wait a seconds for it to make the suggestion

What microsoft employees do in the privacy of their own meeting rooms has basically no effect on me. When Elon Musk appears along side Tommy Robinson in my city, espousing racist "great replacement" to a crowd of drunken thugs and suggesting my neighbours and friends are problem to be expunged from society, well frankly he can fuck right off.

Not much better but at least they're not speaking at far right rallys and lending support to fascist parties across Europe.

That's what science is though * our intuition/ hunch/ guess is X * now let's design an experiment which can falsify X

Interstingly a paper was published today which confirms accelerated warming whislt accounting for the effects of natural fluctations (el nino, volcanism and solar radiation etc) https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025...

We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.

This feels lovely! The fact that it reacts to the pressure on my Wacom tablet puts it above many desktop tools and streets ahead of most stuff on the web. Fantastic work.

Yes. Also there's a weird thing going on where the claims are simultaneously that these tools are super easy to use and everyone and their dog is going to be using them to create awesome software and that it's only going to get easier to do so BUT ALSO that you have to immediately start using them or you'll get left behind. Why should we start now if they're going to be more powerful and more accesible in a years time? seems like the effort working with the imperfect exising version will be wasted.

Yeah, this matches my experience, line by line I can probably write code quicker but producing lines of code has never really been the bottle neck, nor infact the point, in software development.

The issue is that whilst the warning exists and is there front and centre, the marketing around ChatGPT etc - which is absolutely deafening in volume and enthusiasm - is that they're PHD level experts and can do anything.

This marketing obscures what the software is _actually_ good at and gives users a poor mental model of what's going on under the hood. Dumping years worth of un-differentiated health data into a generic chatGPT chat window seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths of large language models.

A reasonable approach would be to try to explain what kind of tasks these models do well at and what kind of situations they behave poorly in.

Accept that most people flake

This is a thing that's always surprised me when I've been in the US. How common it is to enthusiastically arrange to do some activity together, get a meal, play a game, have a drink, whatever, and then for people to just call it off at the last minute. It seems much more socially acceptable to do so than either the UK (where I live) or France (where I have lived and still visit regularly).

The loneliness thing seems common across Europe too though so I'm not suggesting this is the root of the problem. But I do think that whilst this is a global problem the solutions are likely to be local, working with and leveraging different cultural norms.

HTML, CSS, Javascript?

As a customer I often look for the data model without a "moat". I want to be able to move my data to a different supplier without too much hassle

I think the reason is that Bitcoin et al were sold as having practical uses but their ‘success’ has been as a vehicle for speculation. Though the two things are linked (hype for the former drives adoption for the latter) and it’s possible to both hold that crypto currencies are of no practical use and a great investment opportunity. (FWIW, with a long enough time span I believe neither of these is true)

[edited to correct a couple of typos]

This is a very accurate and concise summary of why I can't work in tech companies anymore. Recently I returned for a quick contract to develop a proof of concept app and almost immediately my stress levels whent through the roof. Just the whole thing is a recipe for erroding peoples's ability to produce anything of value.

the behaviour was already bad (sharing your personal information with 1000s of “trusted partners”), companies just want to keep doing it even if it inconveniences their users.

yes! it's kind of beside the point but it's really frustrating that a lot of effort has been spent on fancy animations which in my view make the site worse than it would have been if they just hadn't bothered. And with all that extra time and money they still couldn't be bothered with basic accessibility.

In Britain it’s noticeable that as unemployment benefit and social housing has been stripped back the proportion of people from working class backgrounds with careers in the arts has declined. The most visible example of this is probably actors; pretty much all the current generation of British actors went to public school and were able to support themselves via family wealth as they became established. This wasn’t the case for the generation coming through in the 70s and 80s. The underlying cause is that if you can’t subsist as you learn your craft you can’t learn your craft, I don’t think this is mysterious.

This doesn’t just apply to the arts, if all junior dev roles are stripped away by llm’s where do the talented developers of tomorrow come from? Those who can learn the craft on their own time, those with independent wealth.

At a societal level there is a huge amount of potential talent being left on the table, and imo redistributive policies are the obvious fix. In think this is really important both from a mortal point of view and an economically pragmatic one.

This is really excellent advice.

They were resource intensive (though probably less so than yr average React based site these days) but Flash, especially post AS3, was an order of magnitude or two faster than JS + html/svg/canvas at the time. It was years after the death of Flash that standards based tech finally caught up.

I find the code genuinely inspiring. A lesson that being precious about code quality is not always the best way forward.

True, but that’s not so much a dirty secret as something cartographers will loudly and endlessly tell anyone who’ll listen within moments of meeting them

Perhaps not surprising given what we know about how e.g. satnav usage affects our navigational competence. Feels like outsourcing our reasoning and problem solving would have an analagous effect.

"Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0

Really hope Europe etc. sees the opportunity for a massive win here and invests in bringing these people over

Every single kitchen I've ever visited in the UK has a toaster and a kettle. Just because things aren't popular in the US...

On the subject of Dualit toasters: I've picked several up on the street over the years, cleaned them up and replaced a few parts (heating elements and/ or timers) and for about £10 effectively had a new toaster to give away/ sell. Dualit toasters aren't the best but I wholeheartedly recomend them from the point of view of DIY repair and maintainence. Our current model is 20 years old this year.

Even that's a pretty conservative estimate these days. It's typically less, ~11,000m (18,000km) and the balance keeps shifting in EVs favour over time as the grid becomes more renewables based... https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-21-misleading-myths-ab...