IMSAI8080's comments

I recently moved off Hugo as well to a DIY Python static site generator for my own blog. The trouble I had was I found it frustrating to have to learn how to do something the Hugo way when I knew I could quickly code it in a language I was already familiar with.

I think it comes from a marketing exaggeration of what the card could do. None of the cards of the day could actually produce their own box art (in real time) but the art implies they could in a way they can get away with. It follows the tradition of box art on 8-bit games wildly exaggerating what the in-game graphics might look like and they'd sometimes post a tiny disclaimer in the corner.

Or related: there's no one to nag you about going to get that funny ache checked out. Men particularly are notoriously reluctant to go to a doctor for various reasons but a worried partner might persuade them.

Indeed. It'll be a gravy train for one of the usual big consulting companies. Billions of much needed cash will be wasted and nothing of any value will be achieved.

This ID system is touted as somehow stopping illegal boat crossings (the current political hot topic in the UK) because it will apparently somehow stop illegal work. This is obvious nonsense. Employers are already supposed to do ID checks and face heavy fines for employing illegal workers. Illegal employers obviously don't bother with such checks and pay cash in hand. They will continue not to bother doing any such checks, with or without ID cards.

A great deal of illegal work is actually caused by arm's-length employers such as food delivery apps and other similar platforms. These companies already do fairly robust ID checks. What happens though is people rent out their accounts (often for surprisingly small amounts of money) with the ID check already passed to illegals who actually do the work. The problem is nothing to do with ID checks, it's the fact that the employer never sees the employee in person and doesn't verify on a day-to-day basis who is actually completing the work.

Now you mention it, I can see there's a lot of demand for very cheap video ads on YouTube and such and I can see those kind of productions using AI slop and not really caring. I was just surprised by the calibre of client the poster above mentioned, such as HBO and Netflix and such. That sounded more like AI video making an impact in higher class professional work.

What component of the production process is the AI being used for? Is AI video now good enough for green screen backgrounds or something like that?

It's all about the story that's sold to the higher ups. The higher you go up the corporate ladder, the vaguer the understanding of the technology. The big boss hears from a Microsoft salesman that AI = you can fire 20% of your workforce, but never questions exactly how that works. They probably never got sold static analysis in that way. That was just some kind of tool that somehow helps with that mumbo jumbo that developers spend all day typing. There's no story there that inspires a manager. AI = cut costs is music to the ears of the board. So then pressure gets applied to those lower down.

Something similar was going on with cloud a few years ago. The story was if you get cloud you can get rid of those expensive infrastructure people and it will all be so much more reliable. So the big boss gets a cloud strategy and foists it on those lower down. There's also pressure to be an on-trend boss. If all the other boss' are getting into it, then you need to as well.

That's staggering that 50% are using LLMs. Have you tried making a statement in the job ad such as "in-person technical interview will be required for this position". Of course you may or may not choose to conduct the in-person interview in reality but the threat might cause the cheaters to self-select out.

Yeah it's probably an ancient web site. This was commonplace back in the day when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. Lazy web devs couldn't be bothered to support other browsers (or didn't know how) so just added a message demanding you use IE as opposed to fixing the problems with the site.

I think the sentiment was to keep your content (and audience) portable, not specifically that you don't rely on anyone else's services. If you post everything on Twitter and Twitter decides they don't like you, then that's the end of you. If you host on a personal domain and your rented web host decides to block you, there's plenty more options and you can take your audience with you and they will never know the difference.

My guess is the average technical book is probably in the hundreds of copies over a reasonable lifetime. Mine's sold 91 copies in 5 months. It's a book about how machine learning works. Unknown author, I have no social media and zero advertising budget. It's just Amazon organic listings. The economics are definitely not good but I didn't write it for money. I wrote it mainly for more existential reasons that I wanted to put my words out there and leave something behind in the world.

Already done for skipping the sponsorship sections in videos.

I'd agree with the article authors figures. I have a small family home in the UK and use about 2000 KWh a year electric only. I have gas heating and water.

Electricity cost is currently running at about 28p/KWh. I presume that's a lot more than the US. Electric heating is indeed rarer because gas is about 1/3 of the cost.

I'm thinking your points about air conditioning is likely the major difference combined with the average US home being larger so more space to air-con. Few UK homes have air conditioners (offices do) as it doesn't usually get hot enough. Although this has started to change in the last few years and I'm seeing them occasionally popping up now on neighbours houses. I wouldn't have needed one this year at all so far. Last year, maybe for one week. I was thinking about it but by the time you've looked into organising something the heat has gone and you forget about it until next year. There is a push to move to heat pump heating instead of gas and those units often can do air-con as a byproduct so that may be a driver for change.

Tumble driers are easily available and definitely widespread in the UK. The lack of tumbler driers is a bizarre myth I see again and again on lists of differences between the US and UK. I have no idea how the authors of these lists come to this conclusion. The only idea I have is maybe people from the US who come to the UK rent a furnished house and the landlord cheaps out and decides not to supply one. I do have one and it runs to about 2KWh a load maybe? I don't think that would explain the difference in any case.

I live on Bobby Tables Close.

And FreeTube for desktop (just has regular adblock). It's an alternate client with a nice UI with a similar layout to YouTube.

https://freetubeapp.io/

Pretty sure it's A/B testing. I'm logged in with uBlock Origin and no anti-adblock is visible. I've seen someone on Reddit complaining they were getting this and loads of people replied to say they were not. They're probably trying to figure out how many users/views they will lose or how many new premium subscribers they get or something like that.

There's a book "The People's Republic of Walmart" that makes these arguments. Walmart is a massive company, as large as some entire countries even, that operates an internal economy based on central planning. They tell all their suppliers exactly what will be produced, in what quantities, when it will be delivered and largely what it will cost. Modern stock control systems and supplier integration make it feasible.

There were huge numbers of Sinclair ZX Spectrum clones too in the 80s from all kinds of manufacturers. Pirate Spectrums were widely popular in the Soviet Union:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZX_Spectrum_clones

1 star reviews are often skewed by the "delivery company did something dumb" reviews or a part was missing or there was a problem with returning it or that kind of thing. I often just look that the average rating isn't complete trash, if it's averaging 2 star on a lot of ratings the product probably is not worth considering. Then I pick some longer 4-star reviews and read the text. In the long reviews someone's put some thought into it and they're often more balanced.

I think the spirit of the original comment is people don't want to do enforced work at someone else's behest in order to live. I agree a lot of people would choose to do some kind of work voluntarily even if they didn't have to. Many people on here are probably coders. They may grudgingly drag themselves out of bed to go and code whatever their boss says in their day job, but then go home and code whatever they want to code purely for the joy of building something. It's not that people don't want to do work, they just don't want to do work someone else prescribes. Sometimes prescribed work and work you want to do intersect, then great, but often that is not the case.