I wonder if CTO's care that much if their teams have good communication skills. Is it typical that Devs and Engs get communication training on the job. I have not witnessed that.
One underappreciated aspect of AI’s disruption is its potential to replace much of the web as we know it.
Today, people create content primarily to capture attention—and monetize it through ads. This is the engine fueling giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, who rely heavily on advertising revenue (Meta, for instance, derives 98% of its income from ads). Their entire business model hinges on aggregating user data to target ads more precisely.
But here’s the shift: When LLMs distill content and serve it directly to users, they bypass the original platforms—and their ads. At the same time, LLMs already build detailed user profiles, making ad targeting even more efficient.
This is why Meta is racing to adapt. They recognize that AI could become the primary conduit for ads—and if they don’t control part of that pipeline, their dominance evaporates. The "AI gold rush" isn’t just about superintelligence; it’s about dominating the next generation of advertising.
So the LLM platforms have:
taken the internet, removed the ads from it and are serving it behind their API for a fee and everyone is opting to use it vs the ad ridden internet.
So it's basically "pay a subscription fee per month to use the internet with no ads". And the advertisers get nothing out of that subscription.
"the web as we know it" is about to radically change from being an ad delivery vessel to being another ad delivery vessel that's slightly more intrusive
We have a number of "living documents" that are the specification for the project I'm currently working on. It's terrible. There's no easy way to know that changes have been made or what they are. Sure, there's red-lining and history. But it requires me to visually scan the document for changes every day, sometimes ever hour.
Sure emailing a copy isn't ideal, but it does have the advantage of saying "Here is a set of ideas that I've decided is complete" As opposed to "Watch my stream of consciousness and decide whether it's done or in mid-edit and act on it."
> Sure emailing a copy isn't ideal, but it does have the advantage of saying "Here is a set of ideas that I've decided is complete" As opposed to "Watch my stream of consciousness and decide whether it's done or in mid-edit and act on it."
I agree with your concept but I wish more people treated email like rather than as a stream of consciousness or a series of one-line exchanges that would be better off as chats (in some situations, anyways)
The graph shows the price for 3100 kWh. I'm not sure if that is a very low annual amount or a very very high monthly amount.
The average US household uses 10,000 kWh annually ~833 kWh per month. So I'm guessing most Americans reading the article and looking at the interactive graph are thinking either: this is very cheap or very expensive, depending on whether they are assuming it's monthly or annual.
In the US the average price for 3100 kWh in California would be $1062 which is among the highest in the continental US. So right in line with GB.
In New York it would be $710. Florida it would be $454.
So it's high, but not as eye-watering as it seemed to me initially.
We mostly don't have AC, we have tiny houses, our heating is gas powered. Lots of showers aren't electric either. We don't use huge amounts compared to the US
Unfortunately not. Most houses in the UK are heated using a 'central heating' loop. A closed loop of water that circulated through pipes run through the house and through large radiators in each room. A central boiler, usually a gas boiler, burns gas to heat and circulate this loop to provide whole-house heating, while also typically using a heat exchanger to heat the intake cold drinking water supply into a whole house hot drinking water. (Thus, most houses have cold, hot, and central heating piping).
If you switch out the gas boiler for a heat pump, it can still heat the hot water and heat the central heating loop. But it can't provide cooling that way. There is no infrastructure in most houses to run AC ducting or refrigerant pipes.
You might think that you could simply cool the water in the central heating loop, and therefore make all of the radiators very cold, and use that to move heat out of rooms. In theory that might work, but in most houses these central heating pipes are not insulated and run under floorboards. If you make them cold then they'll cause condensation, leading to water in all kinds of small spaces, and likely leading to warping, damage, or mould.
In the UK, retrofitting AC into an existing house is a huge undertaking in most cases.
Good point. Not to mention the circulation will be all wrong had the radiator been cool instead of warm. (The primary means of heating by radiator actually comes from convection rather than radiation.)
That's the annual figure. But just for electricity. Most UK homes are heated with gas, and many have gas stoves, so the average kWh annual gas figure is much higher (~12,000kWh).
3100 kWh is the figure set by the regulator as the representative annual usage used to calculate prices for e.g. tariff comparison between suppliers. It makes sense to use it here.
Median income and take home pay should be brought into account though. California has one of the highest even by US standards so a $1000 bill for the median Californian family feels much less expensive than for the median Manchester family.
I agree, the mode is probably better. Anyway from the median you can also get a good guess of how much income the band sitting between 25%-75% has since it's a normal distribution. Either comparison should be ok for a guesstimate of the impact of electricity bills for a family in California vs different parts of the UK.
There is clearly a difference between states that invested in projects that went over budget. Power generation is cheaper in a lot of states due to the price of natural gas is dramatically lower than it was 20 years ago. Florida uses gas for 75% of electricity.
We're at ~3.6 MWh in a ground floor apartment with 2 adults, with water heating (e.g. showering) electric but building heating on gas (though we use a space heater a lot as well, probably to the tune of 0.2 MWh/year)
I wonder if I should feel bad since I'm currently at 2830 kWh in 2024 for a single household with all heating costs not coming out of my electric bill.
Hard to say since usage doesn't simply divide by 2: the fridge needs to run regardless of how much food there is (it matters, but not linearly), or if you watch a TV every evening with 2 persons or 1 doesn't show up on the bill either. Probably best to ask friends and see how they get their costs down or if, conversely, you can give them tips
If this article seems super weird to you it's possible that's because you are naturally adept at socializing. For many neuro-atypical folks, remedial socialization requires tons of cognitive focus. It's why some people find social activities exhausting.
> that's because you are naturally adept at socializing
People can be bad at socializing for a number of reasons. if you're depressed it can feel like just thinking that everyone hates you and never reaching out
At least for me it gets easier when you don't think, but this guy is giving the opposite advice
I'm sure this advice might be useful to some people but it's probably the opposite of useful for many others
It's disingenuous to say that Google is targeting uBlock Origin. The Manifest V2 extension architecture is fundamentally different from V3. V2 uses always running scripts while V3 requires event driven temporary workers. Additionally V3 eliminates the obviously risky V2 features like remote code execution and direct modification of network requests.
Not surprisingly, uBlock Origin relies heavily on features in V2 to perform it's functionality. It could probably be rewritten to use V3 but it's not a simple "Hey ChatGPT, make all this code into V3 compliant code." It will require a pretty fundamental rewrite.
Google made common sense improvements to the way extension work for safety and performance. Were they sad that uBlock Origin stopped working? Probably not. But I highly doubt it factored into the need for the V3 changes.
> It could probably be rewritten to use V3 but it's not a simple "Hey ChatGPT, make all this code into V3 compliant code."
There are explicit limitations of V3 that make it not able to be as effective even if rewritten to be compliant. uBlock Origin Lite exists; it can't do everything uBlock Origin can.
It’s perfectly valid to say they don’t care that this is happening. Software businesses carve out exceptions annd extensions all the time and have done so since the dawn of desktop computing.
Actually, the most believable course of action is that Google wanted to
remove the adblockers first, and by doing that they've removed some
of the remote execution vulnerabilities.
If only there was some middleground between "no remote code execution" and "breaking the entire paradigm of adblockers".
The statement that they could be "rewritten" to anywhere near the same effectiveness is straight up disinformation. There are years and years of coverage of this issue that contradict you. The debate has nothing to do with the level of effort for rewrites. This is a hostile decision by a company with a directly adversarial relationship to adblockers.
I feel there were very good reasons that airships were abandoned. I don't know what those reasons were, but unless they enumerate the reasons and explain why they have now solved them, I will assume they are also going to fail.
According to AI, there have been 5 historical attempts to make airships work before the modern resurgence:
The early experimental phase (1780s–1850s),
The pioneering era (1850s–1900s),
The golden age (1900s–1930s),
A post-Hindenburg decline (1930s),
Cold War military uses (1940s–1970s), and
A modern resurgence (1990s–present).
From the article:
"Price gouging is generally defined as a situation where companies set the price above the customary level in order to prevent shortages from occurring."
That sounds like normal supply and demand, not "price gouging". If you only have N of something, you set the price level such that the demand at that price will only be N of that thing.
But people feel it as price gouging. If the price has been X for a long time, and now the price is suddenly several times X because the supply got short, that feels like price gouging rather than "supply and demand".
Well, but see, supply and demand works on both ends.
That is, I'm selling the thing that's in short supply. But why is it in short supply? Because if I'm the manufacturer, I can't make any more of them than I'm making. And if I'm the distributor, I can't sell any more than I can buy from the manufacturer.
And why can't the manufacturer make any more? Typically, because there's some resource that they can't get. So they get some more, but they get it by paying more for it.
So the point is, when the company selling you the widget raises their price, that isn't pure profit. Their costs went up too, because the price of what they need went up.
