2,777 karma · joined November 21, 2012
<https://gotform.co.uk>
<https://thepeopleschamber.co.uk>
Yet one thing does seem different for anyone who just missed the dotcom crash, is that the roles available have fallen off a cliff while the numbers looking for roles seem to be up, at least in the UK. The UAE is even worse. I've spent 20 years hiding from recruiters and now they're all leaving me on read. Karma, maybe.
Is the software open source?
Yes. Our control application, Korova, will be fully open source and maintained long term. It’s a native, lightweight application for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
I get icky feelings about these. Clearly, 18 out of 20 submitted something so I guess most people go along with it and perhaps I'm an outlier.
Despite being a software dev and more invested than the average person, I don't feel like there are that many websites or applications I use really. But there are the best part of a thousand webapps being developed there. I was mulling over starting a language learning platform, but there seem to be 133 being worked on just by people who've posted to HN to say they're working on one.
No wonder most of us seem to struggle with getting traction.
They said a pentest would find them if they were important.
I think we parted with both parties unimpressed with the other.
There's been a significant backlash against this and yet they're just extending it at every turn.
There's been no groundswell of opinion, no technically minded authority pushing expert opinion.
The same people lobbying for the online safety act were pushing age verification tools. The government is exceptionally unpopular, even by the standards of already deeply unpopular governments in recent years.
I despair of the situation in the UK. How have we ended up here?
It's less focused on the social, more on the jobs. With a limit on the number of job applications a user can make; sort of like Twitter, for job application count. And mechanisms to provide feedback to users. Basically trying to address a few shortcomings of LinkedIn as I see them (with other mechanisms in the pipeline).
But it has neither any jobs, nor candidates.
I'm not sure what the strategy should be to resolve that. I've tried a few things that haven't worked out yet.
Pretty similar in the UK.
Are you ok with living in a country where the state has turned a blind eye to widespread grooming gangs?
Nowhere is perfect, to say the least. And my presence or absence has little affect on that. Labourers in the UAE are paid less than they would be in the UK, but more than they would be in their country of origin. And let's face it, the UK isn't giving them jobs. Is it better to give them low paid work as the UAE does, or better not to give them any work at all as the UK does? I don't think these ethical issues are simple, neither do I think there's one right answer.
But my intuition is, that on balance I can give my kids a substantially better life in Dubai. Safer, more sports, more languages, better school facilities. With parents less stressed but more motivated to work.
Dubai is a bit of a trigger for some people. Others I know are going/gone to Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, the US, Aus, Can, NZ, Singapore, France. Your mileage may vary - people leaving can generally give you similar lists of why, but where they go seems varied.
I used to live in Saudi for a time (25+ years ago), and actually really liked much about it then and it had changed markedly when I've been back more recently. I've visited Iraq, I've been detained in Oman under suspicion of espionage and still see virtues in the place. Dubai is positively liberal by comparison and becoming more liberal, while the UK is becoming more authoritarian and despite the official crime statistics, I'm not sure it's as safe as it once was.
The Henley data was poor, but this criticism was too. I don't think we have the data and I fear the Henley data actually underestimates the reality.
FWIW, anecdotally my peers with the means are all looking at leaving and some have gone. I've closed down my business, my wife is looking at keeping hers running remotely because of the staff in it.
And I'm typing this from a Dubai hotel room while I spend a couple of months seeing if I can set something new up that I can do from here. I don't relish saying that, but the UK is not in a good place and there's no light at the end of the tunnel.
For instance, I've been working on an app recently with some social share icon logos in svg.
Whenever I get it to tweak bits of code elsewhere in the same file, 80% of the time it goes and changes those svg icons, completely corrupting some of the logos, curiously consistent in how it does it. Several times I've had that slip through and had to go and undo it again, at which point it starts to feel like the superfast junior dev you're using has malign intent!
They do show drops in the last year or two, but I find it hard to attribute that to Brexit when they're still much higher.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/293277/study-related-vis...
It can be really, really hard to tell when what it's producing is a bag of ** and it's leading you down the garden path. I've been a dev for 20 years (which isn't to imply I'm any good at it yet) and it's not uncommon I'll find myself leaning on the AI a bit too hard and then you realise you've lost a day to a pattern that wasn't right, or an API it hallucinated, in the first place.
It basically feels like I'm being gaslit constantly, even though I've changed my tools to some that feel like they work better with AIs. I expect it's difficult for junior devs to cope with that and keep up with senior devs, who normally would have offloaded tasks to them instead of AI.
If the UK had made a success of HS2 (difficult to imagine with governments in much of living memory, but let's sidestep all of that) then it could have been claimed, perhaps with some merit, that the UK was able to do something with rail infrastructure that the Swiss could never because they were hamstrung by their approach.
But criminal damage is down. Of course, if you call the police for criminal damage, everyone knows they won't turn up and you'll just get a crime number, so unless you're claiming on insurance you're probably less and less likely to report it.
We shouldn't be aiming for London (with 200 phones stolen every day as it is) to reach the level of the worst European or American cities.
Likewise. People (organisations/companies), as far as possible, shouldn't be pandering to this stuff, it's not the answer, it doesn't help them or us.
>Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.
Does it even do that?
It does keep chucking shadcn in when I haven't used it too. And different font sizes.
I wonder if we'll all end up converging on what the LLM tuners prefer.
I looked up an Arai Tour X5, thanks for the link. It gives four stars and some colours for different zones at set impact speeds in m/s in a lab. It tells me it meets standard UN ECE REG 22.06 with a double D ring retention system and composite fibre materials. Super objective and necessary.
But I've read a lot of similar information and, somehow, seeing the results of a person being dragged down the road, for some unknown amount of time, which is pretty super subjective, still feels (perhaps wrongly even) as though it gives me a better understanding than just reading numbers/letters/colours.