samwillis

I get where you are coming from, and some careful calculations are needed. But it's important to note this isn't replacing sand, it increasing the strength, you need 30% less concrete if it's 30% stronger.

The energy needed to extract sand and gravel from the ground, the logistics around moving heavy bulk material, crushing and preparing it, uses a staggeringly large amount of fuel. This is potentially up to 30% saving on that energy use.

If this helps to reduce the quantity of concrete used that can only be a good thing. The cement industry is responsible for 8% of all green house gas emissions and an enormous quality of particulates in the atmosphere, we really need to use less concrete!

I wander if there are other food waste products that can also be used? It would be awesome if they found somethings that was a waste product from food mass-production, something what is available in bulk with simple logistics.

You are absolutely right that XML is better for document structures.

My current theory is that Yjs [0] is the new JSON+XML. It gives you both JSON and XML types in one nested structure, all with conflict free merging via incremental updates.

Also, you note the issue with XML and overlapping inline markup. Yjs has an answer for that with its text type, you can apply attributes (for styling or anything else) via arbatary ranges. They can overlap.

Obviously I'm being a little hypabolic suggesting it will replace JSON, the beauty of JSON is is simplicity, but for many systems building on Yjs or similar CRDT based serialisation systems is the future.

Maybe what we need is a YjsSchema...

https://github.com/yjs/yjs/

Using a centrifuge to separate valuable data from low value redundant components is inspired!

See also the Paul Graham classics "A Plan For Spam" (2002) [0] and "Better Bayesian Filtering" (2003) [1].

Always love to see "simple" 20yo ideas find a new use case.

0: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

1: http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html

Generative AI needs a human in the loop to check its work. How many times does this need asserting?

Generative AI Is not an authoritative source.

In this case the app should have been framed as a tool to "help the user create a meal plan through generative prompts".

They could even have made fun of it in the guidance to the user. Point out that if you give it crazy ingredients it will give you crazy meals.

Generative AI is like having a smart intern do work for you, it needs checking. Sometimes they come to work having been out all night, still drunk, and powered by energy drinks...

Ongoing thread by the creator: https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1689235485728608256

Nope, this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna

> Atropa belladonna, commonly known as belladonna or deadly nightshade, is a toxic perennial herbaceous plant in the nightshade family Solanaceae

> The foliage and berries are extremely toxic when ingested, containing tropane alkaloids. These toxins include atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine, which cause delirium and hallucinations

When I was a kid my Dad spotted it growing in my school grounds...

Feck, I'm uninstalling right now.

I assume this is being used by those services that sell scrapers "real domestic IP addresses", where in fact they are selling a botnet.

We can't just have nice things can we.

Ouch, I wander if they received a bug bounty from Intel for this...

> some workloads may experience up to 50% overhead

They word there are "some workloads", I suspect that performance hit is rare.

Gosh, I did not know that. I read it in about 2005/06, will have to purchase a new copy!

While "the Design of Everyday Things" is as close as you can get to a bible for ergonomics, and design for human interaction, it was published in 1988. It is absolutely worth reading, it will make you a better designer, however it will not give you insight into "modern UX design".

The thing is, not all web development agency's are going to be, good at "SEO" and have it as part of their door service, trying the services of another agency is probably a good idea.

The $62k is an investment in learning how not to do it. They are clearly a very capable agency, and now have some experience they can help advise their customers based on.

So there is the cynical side that says "this post is just SEO", but good SEO isn't "SEO", it's creating good content that users find useful and gain backlinks organically. That's what this post is.

Personally I believe almost anyone that is selling only SEO services are probably using bad tricks and are a very pore investment. SEO is only a tiny fragment of good online marketing, you need a congestive strategy and that will involve many parts of your business. You can't get outsiders to write good marketing content.

Love your content, really looking forward to your next video!

This is a good list.

> You can write a reply and then erase it without sending, and that's the best thing to do in most cases.*

I do this maybe as much as 1/4 comments.

I would also add:

- Don't get into a back and fourth with a single other user, it's generally boring and goes nowhere.

- Don't rise to it if someone is trying to start an argument.

- Be generous, assume you are misunderstanding an apparent negative comment.

- Be complimentary, it makes peoples day.

WASM and Web Workers - unless carefully used - won't magically make your UI snappy.

There are three reasons (for the vast majority of apps) that a UI feels sluggish:

1. The network! Requesting data from a server is slow, by far the slowest aspect of any app. As a start, prefetch and cache, use a CDN, try edge platforms that move data and compute closer to the user. However, if you can explore Local First (http://localfirstweb.dev), for a web app it is the way we should be looking to build in future.

2. They are doing work on the UI thread that takes longer than 16ms. This is where Web Workers are perfect, the DX around them isn't perfect, as another comment suggested Comlink helps, but there is a lot of opportunity here to build abstractions that help devs.

3. Excessive animations that delay user interaction - there is so much bad UX where animations have been added that only make things slower. Good animations have a purpose, showing where something came from or is going, and never get in the way.

Finally, we are well into diminishing returns with front end frameworks optimising the way they do templating and update the DOM. The key thing there now is DX, that is how you pick a framework, benchmarks are almost always useless.

Ah, my mistake. A 1999 discovery while plausible seems like a long time ago. I wander if it really is exactly the compound as they found back then.

They first submitted a (rejected) paper to Nature about LK-99 in 2020, 3 years ago - that we know.

The 99 in the name comes from the date the lab was formed, 1999. Some sources suggest that they have been studying this exact material since 1999, although I don't think that is confirmed.

I think it's safe to assume that they would have been making it for at least 1-2 years before the rejected Nature paper, although potentially significantly longer than that.

So they have been making it somewhere between 4 and 24 years...

Looking at how small the fragments are that other lambs are creating, I assume it's taken them years to get to the point that they can make larger lumps of the stuff that have any sort of uniform structure.

They seem to have been trying to perfect it before publishing.

> seems particularly challenging to synthesize

My reading of the situation was that they have been making this stuff for quite a while (years!), but haven't had the funding or manufacturing expertise to start scaling up and properly improving the process. They are a tiny research lab. The suggestion seems to be that one newer (now former) member of the lab just thought F-this we need to publish, get it out there and start moving forward.

If it is real, the level of investment in finding ways to make this stuff is going to explode. It may be hard to make, but that won't stop us from finding a way to make it on a large scale if it truly is revolutionary.

Further to that, from other groups studying it we will potentially find better and easer to make alternatives.

This was inevitable, it's always been a secondary thing for British Gas.

I worked on the predecessor to Hive back in about '08-'10, the engineering consultancy I worked for designed a version of the "hub" and a number of their security and energy monitoring sensors.

It was the first thing I worked on that made it out into consumers hands (v2 of the hub). I remember one day buying a copy of Wired magazine, and it had an article about them. Seeing a product I had designed in that magazine was a really memorable moment.

Back then they were not part of British Gas but a Cambridge UK startup called AlertMe. A really good bunch of people with a vision for the smart home. The plan was clearly to start with the security products, then energy monitoring was a secondary market. However after getting a big contract with British Gas to supply monitoring to all their customers, they pivoted almost completely to that - and ultimately they were acquired by them.

As I said, they were a really interesting team, their CTO was a former early Acorn employee who had lead RiscOS.

The key connecting element of a lot of the examples of "Memex" is the web platform - http, html, css, js, etc. - and that it is both a document and app delivery system. That is the secret that has made it work. All the examples of file sharing still have a http interface to connect to.

As he touches on, the missing, or a least somewhat disjointed, element is local data and connecting to that from other web destinations. My hope, and belief, is that we are breaking down those local <-> server barriers with newer JS APIs for better file like local storage.

It's just a pity in a way that the web browser and web server were not combined into one element from the start. It's still too hard to make content available on the network from your personal device without a server.

His conclusion about the need to cognitively organise such trails/collections though could well change in the coming years - and potentially sooner. It's clear the LLMs are good at organising and summarising text and data. I'm expecting us to be using tools that will ingest all our work activity (documents, meeting, email, calls, browsing) and automatically curate and file it with a chat based ui to extract that data. We just desperately need that to be local and not server based.

That's a pipe dream, it's just not going to happen. Pushing for copyright change is a distraction for making actual change.

We need change now.

I hate this so much, was registering for a new ISP the other day, they blocked paste in the password inputs and broke my password manger. Such an incredible bad decision from a security perspective.

I think of this as the "appification of websites", we need to stop doing it. We need to move back to SSR and sprinkles of JS on websites.

On the other hand web apps absolutely can play a little more with the UX if it provides value to the user. But if it's in the browser, some of this really do still apply. I'm all in on web apps, its a universally accessible platform for development outside the walled gardens of app stores.

What we need to stop doing is treating every single website as an app!

If you want your page to appear in search results on a search engine, it's not a web app it's a website.

Oh there absolutely are local taxes, and they only increase. Here in the UK it's "council tax", and often paid to the authority one higher up than the one responsible for trees and green spaces. A relatively small amount then trickle down to the local town and parish councils for them to spend.

> A city is not an ecosystem.

A city is an ecosystem, and we desperately need to treat them as one rather than try an obliterate all signed of none human life.

> not room in the soil

Not true in any sense, yes there are services under the ground but that is a tiny amount of usage. Roots can cause problems for hard surfaces, but the answers to that is more turf and planting, exactly as the article is proposing.

> also implies giving up car space.

Also only a good outcome, we need less cars stationary on streets using up valuable space.

Maintenance costs.

At least here in the UK things like maintenance of trees falls to the most local authority (town/parish councils) that are notoriously underfunded and will cut down a tree is it's cheaper than maintaining it. They are allergic to the risk posed by falling branches too.

Quite right, but the solution to this isn't physical discs, or owning the "movie file", it's legislative. We need more restrictive legislation around storing then data mining user activity, and how that information is used. This applies to everything we do on our devices, but also interaction in the real world too.

Anecdotal, but as a family, of all the streaming/TV services we have been subscribed to [0] Disney Plus is the one we by far get the most value from, closely followed by the larger Apple One subscription.

I am not at all surprised to hear they are going all in on Plus.

0: Currently Disney, Apple TV (via One), Netflix, Prime, and we just last week canceled all Sky UK. Had Paramount for a couple of months when there was something we wanted, will resubscribe when it's back. We are downgrading to Netflix basic as it's only the kids that watch it most of the year (there are no ads on the kids account), and will upgrade for the month when one of the two shows we watch are new.