Pure opinion, but I feel like the UK has a strong cultural bias towards doing things the way they’ve always been done, which can make us a bit resistant to new technologies and ways of doing things.
I don't think we're resistant, just hesitant pragmatists. When something new and shiny turns up, we don't necessarily accept the marketing saying it's going to improve our lives. Best to wait for someone else to get through the early adoption pain and work out all the kinks so we don't have to waste our time on it if it turns out to be a lemon.
With this strategy I entirely missed blockchain, crypto and NFTs and am in the process of missing AI.
To think that AI is as irrelevant as blockchain, crypto and NFTs is a tragical error many are committing, sir. Those things were trivial and useless and it was clear since the start, and even if tons of money and marketing were put inside, nothing changed because of the blockchain, at least nothing useful.
AI is a completely different story: you likely not even realize you are already a heavy user just as a side effect of everything technological you use, from voice dictation, to medical, to all the images you see around. Soon also: when you are going to watch a movie. Moreover LLMs are already transforming the way people work.
These two entities, blockchian and AI, have very little in common if not the hype.
So what you're saying is that blockchain, crypto, NFTs had no application up front. Correct. I agree there.
What I am saying is that the applications of AI cannot be fulfilled to the level of the promises made. The promises were made to solicit hype to generate cash, not because the idea was viable or achievable on proof. When we reach maturity, we'll see what is left and I'll wait for that. That's fine. In the mean time I'll have to put up with cats appearing every time I search for dogs in Apple Photos and arguing with ChatGPT about its understanding of the relative magnitude of 9.9 and 9.11, while everyone tells me repeatedly with sweat on their brow that WhateverMODEL+1 will make that problem go away, which it didn't on WhateverMODEL-3,-2,-1,0. Only another $2 billion of losses and we'll nail it then!!!
The end game for all technology changes is not what we think it will be. Been in this game a long time and that is the only certainty.
I'm not sure what promises you are talking about, but I've found LLMs to be extraordinarily helpful for both my job and daily life. They are excellent at translation, summarization, troubleshooting, and brainstorming. I've used OpenAIs API to translate an entire epub, including the HTML so images are retained and the results were shockingly good after some prompt fiddling. With Claude I've received some excellent advice on decorating my living room, organizing my schedule, and quick hypotheticals. There are no pinky promises here, it already works.
For general Q&A they can hallucinate, but so long as you are using it to augment your productivity and not as a driver this isn't any different than using stack overflow, or any other kind of question you might ask on the internet. It's basically a non issue too if you upload a document into its context window and stick to asking questions about that document though.
>I'm not sure what promises you are talking about,
AI wiping out programming as a career. AI wiping out writing stories. AI replacing the need for doctors to diagnose illness. AI generally replacing all white collar jobs.
LLMs are useful assistants, but they are nowhere near the hype flooded everywhere a year or so ago.
Did everyone think it would take two months and all the doctors in the world would lose their jobs to ChatGPT?
AI is a societal shift that will take place over the next 20, 30, and 40 years, much like what happened with personal computing. This is a time horizon that impacts investments right now. Professions that existed for thousands of years will cease to exist. That is an unbelievably big change.
you should celebrate they are people in this world that think like this… as long as they are around we can capitalize on this :) like the people who were still riding horses when fords started rolling around… :)
FWIW, I think LLMs make better stories than quite a lot of the human writers on Reddit.
Not that many of the Redditors were ever going to go on to be successful novelists of course (and I say that as someone who is struggling to finish writing this darn book for the best part of a decade now…)
Honestly, and this is not personal, I doubt your ability to determine a bad summarisation or translation outcome. My wife is a professional translator and spends a good deal of time picking up the steaming wrecks that LLMs have left after someone went for the "cheap" option first. And we're talking best of breed stuff like DeepL here.
As for the other points, I rather like to spend some time thinking on them personally. If you're not connected to the decision yourself, what are you?
> My wife is a professional translator and spends a good deal of time picking up the steaming wrecks that LLMs have left after someone went for the "cheap" option first. And we're talking best of breed stuff like DeepL here.
Just so we are clear, for Japanese to English translation, DeepL is hot garbage compared to a top class LLM with the right prompt. DeepL translations are basically unreadable, and regularly just cut sections out entirely! So I wouldn't call DeepL "best of breed" by any means, it's not even at the starting line. Can't comment on English <-> French/Spanish/German/etc though, never tried it with those.
In my case the epub was technically a replacement for a fan translation I was reading, which was decent enough, but with a simple script and instructions to keep the vibes of a light novel, it got very good, I remain impressed. Next I plan to convert it all to markdown to see if I can help encourage it to structure paragraphs properly, the html tags have so far limited it to line by line translation.
When I've experimented with officially translated works, meaning cases where I've translated the raw and compared it to the official, it's still not up to par, but good enough in my opinion. I'm not aware of any payed service that streamlines this yet though, not sure why. It's nothing like traditional MTL.
> As for the other points, I rather like to spend some time thinking on them personally. If you're not connected to the decision yourself, what are you?
What? It's a dialogue, a conversation, I bounce ideas off it and ask for advice to help guide the direction of my thinking, have you ever even used an LLM? I do this with my friends and co-workers too, do you not do this?
This comes off as a bit presumptuous, an LLM lacks executive thinking, if I'm not directing the conversation then the LLM has nothing to give.
Just to note my wife is Japanese so she's aware of that. She does German / French as well and it's fine for that. But still needs a lot of work cleaning it up.
AI and Crypto both use extraordinary amounts of electricity but at least AI actually does something and has replaced Google for me in at least 50% of searches.
There's a lot of stuff that LLMs can do for me that Google never could, like synthesise a new python script to solve some idea I want to iterate on.
But also, Google results nose-dived and only recently seemed to get less bad… though now it seems to be the turn of the YouTube home page to be 60 items of which 45 are bad, 14 are in my watch later list already, and only 1 is both new to me and interesting.
Based on my experience growing up in the UK, then having long visits to the US and moving to Germany… the UK overall is fairly open minded to new tech and social change.
Well, so long as the monarchy and the castles remain.
I think the Brits are pretty fast at adopting technology, their digital public service infrastructure for example is excellent as is their research and engineering sector but I think they have a pretty big distaste for hucksterism or fads and a very no-nonsense attitude. Sort of like us Germans but less digitally averse and with a better bureaucracy.
I'm British but have lived in Germany for several years. I'd say the Germans are explicitly more conservative than Brits. Germany has several aspects in business and law which do, and admittedly I never lived in medieval times, literally feel like something out of some medieval guild system. "I must tithe to the Driver's Guild" is the long and the short of the entire learning to drive system here for example. And Germans just accept it, or even more pathetic, defend it. They just accept having these legally mandated wallet inspectors / guild members ambushing them every now and then for cash. Baffling.
Hard disagree. You might think that, then you see how other countries do things, and you realise we're actually pretty good at adopting new stuff. Not the best, but better than most.
People living in techno bubble are always surprised how much „normal” people are behind and how much they don’t care.
I see people who are doing white collar jobs where most of it is doing stuff on computers being absolutely not interested in any of it.
I work with generally people from all over Europe and it mostly is the same so I would not say Brits are like that but more generally people have bias towards doing things the way they’ve always been doing.
Last month our company released new interface because old one is built on unsupported tech and with all the regulations we have to change it anyway - outrage lasted 2 weeks - people are getting used to new way and in 2 months no one will remember the old way.
There's many people like me who were born and pushed for more tech and are now back pedaling. You start to see through the trends, the marketing, the manias.. and nowadays the disconnect between joy, usefulness and actual results.
Could be, but a bit of conservatism ain't gonna hurt, more conservative nations like Switzerland or nordics are doing more than fine long term, QOL is top notch globally for various reasons.
Much better than having sheepish mentality and chasing what rest of the crowd is chasing too, shows some character and thinking for oneself and not being an easy subject to manipulation. X was almost pure toxicity even before musk's ego trip and I never understood why I should care about some random brainfarts of people 'I should be following', don't people have their own opinions formed by their own experience? Thats rather poor way of spending limited time we have here, on top of training oneself in quick cheap dopamine kicks which messes up people for rest of their lives.
ChatGPT at least tries to be added value, but beyond a bit better search, hallucinating some questionable code and some random cute pics (of which novelty wears off extremely fast), I don't see it, I mean I see the potential, just not reality right now. Plus that code part - I want to keep training myself and my analytical mind, I don't want to be handed easy answers and become more passive and lazy. That's why I do git via command line tool and not just clicking around. That's why I don't mind at all doing some easier algorithms instead of having them served. My employer only wants good result, I am not working in sweat shop being paid by number of lines of code per day.
Quality life is about completely different things anyway. IMHO UK is fine in this regard.
Facts. It’s why they have no semiconductor industry, why their cars are all literally the most unreliable brands, and why they are becoming poor af compared to Americans. I’m so tired of euros trying to act smug about them not working hard. There’s a reason why the EU and the UK are fading into obscurity.
It seems inevitable the UK will get left behind in AI. We have a low investment, low efficiency, and low risk culture that doesn’t lend itself well to tech innovation.
It’s fairly common for these sorts of things to be iPhone-specific, and you can’t test on Apple devices without owning one, or paying altogether too much.
I’ve found Epiphany (a.k.a. GNU Web), which is based on WebKit, to be decent proxy for testing on Safari—in my last project of this sort, where I was developing on Firefox and could check in Chromium, I was able to reproduce each of the three or four Safari issues that were raised, in Epiphany.
It’s fairly common for these sorts of things to be iPhone-specific
Having done a bunch of mobile web work recently, I don't think that's actually true -- I hit weird issues on both Safari (on iOS) and Chrome (on Android). (And Firefox for that matter)
Safari does have its weird glitches but it's not inherently glitchier than other browsers.
There are some APIs it doesn't implement, but you don't need real hardware to catch that, MDN / caniuse has all the compatibility data and there are tools like ts-browser-compat for automated checks.
you can’t test on Apple devices without owning one, or paying altogether too much
Right, that's the real problem. But again I don't think it's Apple-specific. If you're a Mac user, in principle you could install Android Studio and test your app there, but a) that's a huge hassle, and b) an emulated phone on a desktop isn't close enough to a real phone to be useful for QA.
You really need to test on both iOS and Android hardware, there's no two ways about it.
I guess it would be good if you could install Safari on Android, and/or real Chrome on iOS. Then you'd only need to buy one phone. And that is on Apple, as they're the one blocking it in each case.
> It’s fairly common for these sorts of things to be iPhone-specific, and you can’t test on Apple devices without owning one, or paying altogether too much.
That's correct, but Apple phone users are customers with money used to paying.
> You can’t test on Apple devices without owning one, or paying altogether too much.
Yep! And it sucks, but this is the #1 reason why most web developers are using macs. If you want to test across all major platforms, it's the only way to do it from one machine (testing windows on a mac is a bit iffy on Apple Silicon macs, but it can be done).
I don't have any stats, but this has been my professional experience in the UK. It's entirely possible that this doesn't hold up worldwide, or outside of specialist web development agencies.
The issues differ wildly between Android and iOS and often a fix for one device, OS and browser breaks something in another. It's not easy. Also, not everyone has access to an iPhone or a Mac with a simulator, and even the simulator has its own irregularities with how things are behaving that are not consistent with an actual device.
Nobody denies the climate has always changed. The issue is with human induced climate change is the rate of change.
It’s the difference between bringing a car from 100mph to a gentle stop and slamming it into a brick wall. The rate of change we’ve introduced doesn’t give ecosystems or species the time they need to adapt.
I've got a BSc and I'm fully acquainted with the arguments for man-made climate change, as well as the proposed solutions.
Even if one concedes that the climate is 'rapidly changing' solely or primarily because of man-made action, it doesn't follow that those changes will lead to catastrophe for people everywhere, particularly those in the first world.
Having said that, Phoenix hitting 100 degrees for 100 days in a row doesn't support 'rapid climate' change occurring when the reference is the past 150 years. To put it another way, suppose the planet is warming (for whatever reason) - eventually we would get 100 days of 100 degrees in Phoenix, right? Who are you to say that it's rapid or unnatural? Cycles happen - neither of us can say this didn't also happen 500/1000/2000/10,000 years ago. I live in Melbourne and the winter we just had (here in the southern hemisphere) was the coldest I can remember. The year before was mild. Variance happens, in both the short term and the long term. Hysteria is laughable.
I'm not saying we shouldn't take care to pollute as little as is reasonably possible, but promulgating wholesale societal change is never going to get the Green left (or whatever they prefer to be called) what they want.
Not so much 'screw them' as much as pointing out that the hysteria surrounding 'climate change' is not proportional to the impact it will have on the very people who are being hysterical about it.
I'm all for trying to minimise pollution and greenhouse gases and for using renewables where it's reasonable and economically feasible. I'm not in favour of dismantling a system because of something that won't really affect my society all that much.
Comparing Melbourne's weather to global patterns is a stretch. For non-Australians, Melbourne weather is the subject of the song "Four seasons in one day".
I know subtlety is quite difficult for certain people, but you should consider the difference between narcissism and a lack of empathy. Turns out they aren't at all the same thing so it isn't even subtle.
This either hasn’t been tested on a mobile device or the developer decided mobile devices weren’t important enough to properly support at launch. Bad look either way.
i had a double take - initially skimmed over the page then went to HN comments- then re-opened it (even in a new FF container); saw no popups (i only had the cookie policy hover-footer) , and adnauseam is at (0).. im on desktop FF with strict mode and not even my most agressive blocking stuff - curious what youre all running where the site gave you those anoyances (not that im trying defende them)
It's true: in addition to comments like the above where they complain about pop-up ads that no one else sees (because everyone else is using an ad-blocker), in discussions about ad-blockers, or when someone flat-out asks them why they don't just use an ad-blocker, they'll say they believe blocking ads is immoral etc. and try to shame people for blocking ads.
That was quite the read. It’s genuinely perplexing to see people defend the currently atrocious state of the ad world by comparing it to theft. So weird.
I'm running Iceraven on Android with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger and I got hit by a bunch of pop-ups. When I left and went back, I didn't get any. Maybe you've been to the domain before?
according to my browser history once in june 2023 and once in june 19 2024; but using FF with containerized tabs - if thier ad model is that scarse then id assume they certainly dont depend on ads for their income
My iPad Mini is my only device that isn’t armed to the teeth with ad blockers, mostly because of iOS restrictions. As makers, it’s good to be reminded of the average Joe’s web experience.
Totally agree. It is also why I would never even consider freelance.
The idea of creating a personal "brand" makes me nearly physically sick I hate the idea so much.
I am very risk averse. I love the predictability of what shows up in my bank account.
"Freelance" for me would just be a euphemism for being unemployed. The situation would just make me depressed and I would end up just getting a new job.
It seems to me the type of person who would thrive at freelancing doesn't need to read this thread or ask these questions to start with.
i have to market myself just as much when applying for jobs. really. i don't see the difference.
actually, there is a difference. if i have services, i can market those as products. if i look for jobs then i have to market myself. so in fact, as a job hunter the personal brand is even more important than when selling services.
i get the risk aversion, that's a different issue.
