simonbarker87

Agreed, but so far the picture painted around mass AI adoption looks like it will make that situation worse not better. So until a viable alternative is produced people will be very concerned about loosing work.

> Most people living today take it for granted that modern "work" is the way it is and the way it should be.

Which is understandable when the alternative is generally poverty.

I have a suspicion that, outside of tech, AI WILL speed up the mundane aspects of people’s jobs, that part which they spend 80% of their time getting through, so they can then do the 20% where they actually add value.

BUT the new time they unlock will be spent doing more of the mundane work that previously just didn’t get done because it was overtaken by events or it got done to the absolute barest minimum level.

As a result the 20% where they add value never really grows or changes and in fact might be less valuable because of all the extra noise created by doing more tasks in the 80%.

This is working theory and likely full of holes.

Take up mountain biking then, I’m covered in gravel rash scars, tear scars, random cuts from trees scars, dents in my shins from stones, slices from maintenance, all sorts. It really is a sport that bites back.

As I’ve aged the scarring stays longer and is darker so I’m starting to look like a population distribution map of some kind.

Wouldn’t change it for the world, great sport, great adventures.

“Great software is opinionated” is something life been saying for years. I forget if I read it somewhere, heard it or came to the concept in my own thinking. All that is to say I don’t claim it’s a unique thought. And yet. I have to say it so often to the teams I’ve worked with or managed.

The opinions are those of the creators and that isn’t changing with AI.

Most documentation reads like you should already know what you’re doing, which makes sense because it was written by someone who already knows how to do the process.

I think good technical writing requires the same skills as good product ownership, that is empathy for the user and their perspective. Often technical writing is an after thought and not someone’s whole role and it really shows.

Good article

That’s exactly what the WEEE directive is in the UK/EU. I ran a company that manufactured and sold an electrical product and we had to pay an amount based on weight sold per quarter from memory. I have no idea if it’s actually used to help with disposal of end of life electrical waste but we paid a decent amount of 8 years of sales.

I’ve been writing code for 20 years. I’ve made websites, native apps, embedded, web services, IoT, agents, basically the lot.

People are always surprised when they hear me say I hate tech. I don’t want your app, I don’t want to scan your QR code, yes I really do just want to speak to a person and no I don’t want to automate or make “smart” anything in my home.

It’s not really that I hate tech. It’s that I hate what most tech products are.

The promised land never came and I highly doubt the AI era is going to make it magically better.

I will however keep doing my best to improve the systems I work on and pushing product and engineering do better.

That’s the thing about large scale public health interventions like that, if it works it will look like you overreacted and you still won’t know if it’s because it worked or if it was never as bad as was feared.

Number three is basically the golden rule.

From memory when I ran a production line with soldering stations ventilation is equally (and possibly more) important for lead free solder.

Agree. People are lashing out and aligning with view that makes them feel important again I think.

It’s very difficult for anyone person to say because we all see our slice.

If you got an education in an area that’s in demand and you are a good communicator, made sensible choices and were lucky to not have any major misfortune hit you directly then more than likely you have a pretty nice life that has been getting better and unaffected but the political circus.

If you were unlucky with your starting point in life, didn’t get an education in an in demand area, or did but really struggle to communicate, or got hit by some bad luck then life could feel very stalled at the moment and frustrating.

There’s a lot of negative news around the UK at the moment and I think a lot of it is taking real aspects of life here and massively blowing it up or extrapolating across the whole country. I suspect by a certain political party funding negative news on a mass scale.

Crime is up in some places, but still generally not very high. Pot holes are up in many areas, but roads are still good in the main. Some industries are declining but even within things like manufacturing there is a lot of growth and jobs.

It’s the fifth largest economy in the world and most things works pretty well. So swings and roundabouts.

Apply MP wages to nurses is actually a solid idea I recon.

Never thought I’d see my home town being discussed here. I no longer live there but regularly go back.

It’s not a great town but it’s also not truly awful. It’s a reasonably deprived town that harks back to its former grand past with an older demographic constantly topped up by people retiring there from east London.

There’s a lot of very nice people who are mortified that Farage is the MP and that the town has become a political joke. I struggle to see how people can vote for Farage but if you walk around the town center (which is perfectly safe like all of the UK is regardless of what social media and US news outlets say) you can understand why people want some change.

In reality there’s no well paid jobs and, with the aging demographic and no reason for anything to be based there, no reason for there to ever be any sadly.

Also Farage is in the district a lot more than the media makes out, I hear enough second and third hand sightings of him that he must be there more than once a month.

It’s only has a network request in the loop if the interaction requires a network request.

Htmx is a replacement for network interactions, not every bit of UI interactivity.

Of all the airports to do it at in the UK this is probably the one that doesn’t need it. Parking at Gatwick is a breeze, lots of options close and far from the airport and quite reasonably priced. Now Luton, that’s another story.

It’s not human surpassing intelligence though in my opinion. If we had the same constraints on that task then we would also come up with the idea of creating our own viewer and if, like the LLM, the knowledge to do so was embedded in our brain we would do it, it would just take longer because we can’t type as fast. So instead we would buy or compile a viewer since the problem is already solved.

Looks like that’s one factor. A number of brands I expected to be marked as Avoid based on who owns them were indeed marked as such. Pleased to see a few of my chosen brands were marked as good. Shame that basically no sun glasses company is good.

This is called the urban heat island effect. It’s well studied and well understood.

But animals and humans are different. Humans are an animal but to suggest a lion, dog, fish etc operate in the same manner seems a little odd to me.

My dog was perfectly happy to snooze most of the day, play with toys occasionally, go for walks and try to hunt rodents. I on the other hand would be incredibly bored with that.

There’s usually some kind of short cut action to disable that for the car. In a Mercedes you hold the volume down button in the steering wheel for 3 seconds and it “updates settings” which is basically disabling that annoying feature.

Couple that with a framework with decent server side rendered template support and htmx for network based interactions and you’ve got 90% of the <acronym_of_the_moment> stack with 10% of the complexity.

Sadly nothing specific, I founded that company with a friend so I don’t really know if another path in. Automotive production is interesting and there are lots of ways in that don’t require a formal background in the area if you’re willing to start nearer the bottom again, quality engineering is interesting and that brings you near the line without always being on it.

We made a relatively simple fan unit to improve airflow for UK central heating radiators, some fans, an electrical harness with a custom designed control PCB and a mix of injection moulded and extruded plastic parts.

Factory was about 2,500 sqft from memory. Ran the business for 8 years, made and sold 75,000 units but ultimately ended the business due to a lack of poor financing and a lack of business resilience to the weather (when it was unseasonably warm in winter our sales would drop)

I setup and ran a small (10 people) factory many years ago in the UK. Hand assembly and a bit of soldering. It was the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done. I built custom jigs, worked with my team to improve the process, managed inventory, line balancing, work in progress, dispatching, deliveries, built palette racking, learned about kanban and buffers, wrote software to manage it, all working with a team of great people.

If anyone has the opportunity to work in manufacture or adjacent to it I highly recommend.

It’s a shame it’s quite possibly the ugliest car I’ve seen in a long time.

I want to work with people like this. Build the right solution to the problem with the simplest technology you can.

Yeh the style read like a human, but you’re right, some dashes, annoyingly I have historically used a lot of - in my writing so now I need to stop using them

How refreshing to read something not written by an LLM, unless they promoted it extensively with their own writing style first and I’ve been tricked but this felt much nicer to read than a lot of what I’ve read recently

I’d be interested to know two things:

1. What’s the job satisfaction like day to day being an engineer on this project? How have they adapted to this way of working?

2. How much did it cost? Work is being done whilst the engineers sleep but if that 6 hours overnight task cost $300 and could have been done by a person in 2 hours is it a real saving?