incangold

Mmm. Same argument for any seat of power though.

“It’s not always going to be the (oligo|mono)polistic corporation you personally wanted” either.

So we invent democracy, term limits, anti-trust, branches of government, environmental safety regulations, the SEC etc. etc.

Whether in the public or private sphere we have created social technologies to make power more diffuse and constrained, and corruption and misalignment less likely (never impossible).

One feature of the last decade is the steady erosion of these safety rails.

One concerning feature of AI is the speed and volume it is capable of failing at if poorly controlled, whether or not it’s more accurate than humans.

Even if humans failed at the same rate, if you tried to exploit at scale you’d be throttled by the size of the support team. The failure would happen at human-scale time frames and throughput.

I enjoy React and I’d take it over all of those other things. I wouldn’t take React over htmx/data-star and server rendering if that’s all I needed, and even if I had a couple of pages that needed a little bit more.

Console hardware is subsidized by games sales- it’s much cheaper than a similarly capable PC.

Important content and information I want is on YouTube. I pay a YouTube subscription.

I have ADHD. YouTube shorts are poison. I don’t want them. I keep clicking “not interested”. They go away for a bit, they come back, I waste hours of my life scrolling through them before I notice. I click “not interested” 20 more times to get a few days relief…

Even when you’re the customer, you’re not the customer.

VAT can be considered a regressive tax because the poorer I am, the more of my money I spend on goods and services, and the less on savings and investments. As a proportion of income, poor people spend more on VAT than rich people. I think it’s about double, in the UK. So you’re right that cutting VAT helps richer people more in absolute terms. But in terms of of quality of life it helps poorer people more.

[edit] assuming we’re talking about VAT on things that everyone buys. Which is why tax codes often exempt essential items from VAT.

One infuriating thing about PACE is that even the fraudulent results only showed a 22% recovery rate.

For a disease as serious as ME/CFS, a treatment with a 22% recovery rate is far from good enough. Even if PACE stood up to scrutiny it wouldn’t have made sense to give up on finding better treatments.

Another example of “entertainment” with scope for unconstrained spending: digital goods in the less scrupulous kinds of video games

I find LLMs are often better for X vs Y questions where search results were already choked by content farm chaff. Or at least LLMs present more concise answers, surrounded by fewer ads and less padding. Still have to double check the claims of course.

You should be able to choose to switch off security as you wish. You should also be able to choose to leave it on.

“About the same” is not “the same”, and there are tipping points. The gini coefficient has still seen a decent bump.

But anyway, gini is a coarse measure. Look at the chart below that, showing income percentages going steadily upwards for the top 10 and 1%.

Most worryingly, look at the decline of the middle 40%. A healthy middle class keeps countries stable. You need a good chunk of society who feel like the system works for them.

And it’s not just perceptions, it’s fundamental stuff. A teacher could afford a house in the 90s; they can’t now. For all the boomers bang on about mobile phones and flat screen TVs, in the end those are luxuries compared to clean, secure accommodation. The days of getting a mortgage on one income, or having access to nice council housing are gone.

I agree with the broad point- as an industry we still fail to think of logging as a feature to be specified and tested like everything else. We use logging frameworks to indiscriminately and redundantly dump everything we can think of, instead of adopting a pattern of apps and libraries that produce thoughtful, structured event streams. It’s too easy to just chuck another log.info in; having to consider the type and information content of an event results in lower volumes and higher quality of observability data.

A small nit pick but having loads of data that “most likely no-one will look at ever again” is ok to an extent, for the data that are there to diagnose incidents. It’s not useful most of the time, until it’s really really useful. But it’s a matter of degree, and dumping the same information redundantly is pointless and infuriating.

This is one reason why it’s nice to create readable specs from telemetry, with traces/spans initiated from test drivers and passed through the stack (rather than trying to make natural language executable the way Cucumber does it- that’s a lot of work and complexity for non-production code). Then our observability data get looked at many times before there’s a production incident, in order to diagnose test failures. And hopefully the attributes we added to diagnose tests are also useful for similar diagnostics in prod.

Fakes over mocks every time

As a patient with an under-served condition I quite often focus on the financial rather than human cost of not having a better system of care when talking about it.

If someone’s going to object to improving the system it’s mostly likely going to be on grounds of cost.