rowanajmarshall

No, Europe is not a factor in cutting-edge chip assembly. That is a tiny fraction of the overall supply chain to manufacture a finished, compute-ready semiconductor. There is sense in not trying to compete with the "sexy" part of chip manufacturing, and instead concentrating on the steps of the supply chain you are already good at.

There are a lot of tasks machines can do today that humans do anyway. Think baristas and bartenders. People pay more for human-made goods too, despite mass-manufacturing being a couple centuries old at this point. Having a human face is a competitive advantage in lots of stuff.

Building out a housing heatmap of England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland publish housing data differently, working on getting them integrated!

https://housepricedashboard.co.uk

Every now and again someone will open a "American Diner" here in London, then have normal opening times and serve basically the same food every pub serves, only with more milkshakes.

Like, no. I want my American-style hash browns, over-easy eggs, and country-fried steak, not the same burger every pub on the street is doing.

And (refillable) filter coffee please, not just espresso drinks.

I recently visited my brother in Spokane (we're British, he moved out there a few years ago) and we went to Frank's Diner, still in it's original 1906 railcar. Not my first diner experience, but by far my favourite. Diners are probably my favourite part of American culinary culture.

Also, on my first visit to San Francisco, my mum and I stayed opposite the Pinecrest Diner on the edge of the Tenderloin. Being jetlagged, I woke up at 5am the first morning and went there just as it opened, and having my coffee and huge breakfast as various diner regulars stopped by was just fantastic.

Europe is a gigantic manufacturer of vast quantities of goods. It has not deindustrialised at all.

Two choropleth map projects I've wanted to make for a while:

https://housepricedashboard.co.uk - shows a visualisation of house prices in England and Wales since the 90s, with filters for house types, real vs nominal, and change views over time

https://councilatlas.co.uk - similar structure to the above, but focusing on local council datasets. The idea is to make it easier to compare your local council's performance against the rest of the country.

Already a feature, you can switch between nominal or inflation adjusted in the Change View panel -https://housepricedashboard.co.uk/?tab=change&start=2014&end...

Ah shoot, it's not .com, it's .co.uk. So https://housepricedashboard.co.uk.

I actually wrote a webapp to show this, check it out - https://housepricedashboard.co.uk/

London house prices are falling quite a lot in real terms.

https://rowanajmarshall.co.uk. There's a couple fun stuff in there, including some recipes I like, links to stuff I wrote, and a live sleep meter.

I've been practicing with Claude Code and creating a webapp I wished exists every time I've moved house - https://housepricedashboard.co.uk

I've spent a lot of time combing through Rightmove and Zoopla getting an idea of housing costs in different areas, now I can do it in seconds.

As much as I appreciate the difference between literal infinity and consumers' demand for software, there's just so much bad software out there waiting to be improved that I can't see us hitting saturation soon.

I think the downside is the developers who love the action of coding managed to accomplish several things at once - they got to code, and create things, and get paid lots for doing it.

AI coding makes creating things far more efficient (as long as you use AI), and will likely mean you don't get paid much (unless you use AI).

You can still code for the fun of it, but you don't get the ancillary benefits.

They're pretty extraordinary, but funny thing is the expensive bits of London (central, west, and bits of north) have fallen the most in real terms over the last decade!

Ach, sorry! iOS is the one common platform I don't have easy access to.

Then you should also look at Wayve (self-driving cars, $1 billion Series C), Lighthouse (travel and rental data, $370 million Series C), Highview Power (novel energy storage, £300 million). Lots more too. I won't deny that the UK specialises in fintech, but there's a lot more going on than that.

> Good luck getting a farm-tech startup funded, no-one will take a punt.

There are so, so many examples of British agtech companies getting funded:

https://www.lettusgrow.com/blog/2020/1/9/press-release-uk-ag...

https://edinburgh-innovations.ed.ac.uk/news/roslin-technolog...

https://fischerfarms.co.uk/fischer-farms-secures-26m-funding...

https://tropic.bio/tropic-biosciences-raises-28-5-million-se...

> There was not only no dishwasher, there was literally no space for a dishwasher.

This is just London, out of the 8 years I've spent here, 3 of them were spent with a dishwasher. Tbh I've got a dishwasher now and barely use it.

I run a Mistral model on my phone!

> Replacing blue collar workers for robots hasn't been super duper great.

That's just not true. Tractors, combine harvesters, dishwashers washing machines, excavators, we've repeatedly revolutionised blue-collar work, made it vastly, extraordinary more efficient.

Why would a bad dependency ratio mean we stop using industrial fertilisers? If anything it's the opposite, using more fertiliser and technologies to cope with labour shortages.

He can be both an excellent business/technical mind, and a massive asshole with a fragile ego. Hell, you could argue those things go together more often than not!

A few ways:

* I run a 5K over lunch or after work 2-3 days a week. Very good for clearing my head when working on something tricky. Also fantastic for getting through audiobooks!

* If it's a nice, quiet weekend and friends are free, we often go on a hike somewhere outside the city.

* If it's a nice, quiet weekend and friends aren't free, I'll go on a bike ride somewhere in the city.

* Every now and again I'll go bouldering with friends, or maybe swimming.

* Finally, I walk a lot, because I live in London. You rack up a lot of steps just getting places here.

At least in the UK we do - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright

DeepMind was also founded here, 5 years before OpenAI was.

90%+ of all email traffic in encrypted, and I'd bet that goes up with consumer-facing providers like Gmail: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?h...

A suit and tie wouldn't be blinked at in almost any other office job interview, especially if it's not on the West Coast. Tech has it's uniform like any other industry, and people care _deeply_ about sticking to it. It just happens to be casual wear we've adopted.

Say that again after interviewing for a developer job wearing a suit and tie.

Same, but the fail-state of a car of plane is a block of steel with an indoors, markedly less useful than a heavy-but-functioning bike.

I don't think that's true, it's hard finding comparative figures that aren't out of date (one below is mostly ~2004), but it indicates European countries generally have more SMEs per 1000 people than the US, and a couple of more recent articles say the UK still has more.

Anecdotally, I live in Europe and know plenty of entrepreneurs, albeit mostly either in the tech space or as incorporated side gigs.

Source: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micr...