What a dumb take.

I make full use of my gigabit broadband (in both the places I have it - Bucharest and Bangkok), so there very much is a “point”. I’m not going to bother enumerating all the ways I use it though, because the response will just be “ohhhh, but normal users don’t do that”. But exceptions are normal - the mistake being made here is assuming that you represent the whole human race just because you don’t have a need for something.

Personally I think sanitary towels are useless, because I’ve never needed one and indeed the majority^* of the population don’t need them…

This is just a cope post; “gigabit broadband is so fucking expensive in the UK I’m trying to justify it not being necessary”. My gigabit fibre in Bucharest costs about 8eur/month, in Bangkok 15eur/month. I suspect if broadband in the UK were reasonably priced, this blog post would never have been conceived…

^* before you argue, remember (pre-)puberty and menopause are things.

I mean, it was before Bitcoin came along.

It’s rather like the hacker/cracker(defunct) thing.

Ahh, I fell hard in love for a full 24hrs with a dancer from Miami in London Stringfellows a few decades ago… She had the looks and body of Grace Jones and was studying Computing at UCL.

Nothing but admiration. I hope she graduated and has a fine career.

Not me; I contacted my pension fund last week to move it entirely out of equities and into bonds & cash.

Which is no guarantee, but… I’m not close enough to retirement that this would normally be sensible, but I know I’m close enough that I’d never earn back the losses from the mother of all crashes that is riding into view on the back of these IPOs (and the “I can’t believe it’s not a crime!” changes to index rules to fast track this nonsense into trackers, guaranteeing that pension funds and the like will be left holding the bag.)

The problem with Starlink is it’s only ever a niche service. There’s a limit to how many satellites you can have in the sky over paying subscribers (as opppsed to, say, deserts or oceans) - I did some back of the envelope maths that put it at about 15 million subscribers with acceptable speeds, maybe double that with terrible service.

By comparison, Deutsche Telekom in Germany alone has 5 times as many mobile subscribers, and a similar number of fixed-line broadband. Amd best of all, Deutsche Telekom doesn’t need to replace all its infrastructure every 5 years when it falls to Earth.

So on what possible basis does Starlink warrant a “to the moon” valuation, and traditional providers don’t? Traditional providers can serve more consumers, at lower cost, with better return on assets…

Starlink, and batshit ideas about datacentres in space, exist for one reason: US infrastructure is complete shit. It would almost certainly be long-run a better investment to fix the power, water, and telecomms infrastructure on the ground, but right now you have a government that would rather private companies fire money into space than pay taxes.

Yeah, so basically he didn’t have cash, wanted to pay by ThaiQR, and they said “sorry, we don’t take that, we do take WeChat Pay”.

Which could just as easily have happened in any 7-11.

Thailand was on its knees begging for Chinese tourists to return after Covid. They’d be wise to do something about the goddamned Russians that are ruining the place - or any of the other endless-repeating-visa-run drug and sex offender contingents - before anyone starts worrying about the Chinese.

Wow. That’s some fan service…

Awesome - thanks, that worked. (And yay, Steam - preordered :-).)

Anyone know if there is a non-YouTube source for the video? (Google want me to ‘connect my account’ to ‘verify my age’ and, well, screw that.)

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I think that’s more about telling users though that if they let an apl find local devices, that can be used to deduce your location.

Which is exactly the right amount.

Honestly, I hope the AI companies implode as well - and am fairly sure they will; OpenAI’s entire business model is that they will be AI gatekeepers and everyone will have to pay them for access - but even now, the only way they can make this true is by artificially inflating the cost of inference hardware. That’s simply not sustainable - cheap inference accelerators will come from China (ok, maybe somewhere else but at the moment US industrial policy is doing its best to make it China) and then it’s game over for that business plan.

But while that makes OpenAI et al a shitty investment prospect, it won’t stop AI taking your job if you don’t adapt. You would be amazed at the capability of models that you can run locally right now. All the major providers can go out of business tomorrow, and the guy who is running Qwen locally will still be twice as effective a developer as you are.

The genie is absolutely out of the bottle and not going back in. The choice is to either find a new profession (which is totally valid, of course,) or start learning now how to be one of the people who survives by learning to use the tools better than anyone else. LLMs are dumb as a box of rocks, they are always going to need an actual intelligence to understand how to actually use them to accomplish any non-trivial useful thing. The people who get that and learn that will be the ones who still have a job when all this washes out.

(The “herp derp no they’ll replace you too the only thing to do is wail and protest” contingent are inhabiting a weird space where they believe that LLMs are (a) useless but also (b) actually super intelligent and will replace us. Both these things cannot be true… Reality is they’re very dumb, but still very useful. These things absolutely can be true; my compiler has zero intelligence, but it’s still extremely useful and I’m glad I don’t hand write assembler any more…)

He may be dead right, and unduly pessimistic at the same time.

The industry massively overhired relatively unskilled people who believed the job was “writing code”, for a few decades; those people got by thanks to Stack Overflow and the fact that most of the code that needed writing really didn’t need much skill anyway. There’s very little innovation or engineering in most business platforms - a couple of decent architects and an army of code monkeys can deliver most of the software that’s needed. We also developed programming languages and frameworks that made it much easier for the unskilled developers to be productive.

Sad to say, these are the people now loudly wailing about the iniquities of AI. If you thought churning out code was the profession - you absolutely should be very concerned that AI will replace you - it will. But if you realised that code was only ever a side effect of the job, which was applying computing to solve problems - you have little to worry about. AI is just a new tool to do it, and is no more a threat than optimising compilers, mamaged runtimes or IDEs were.

When I started my career, I wrote assembly code by hand for platforms that barely even had an operating system. Then C. Then Java - and as far as I’m concerned, every programming language since then has pretty much had training wheels permanently attached… For the last few years, I’ve preferred Rust, although the job has been more about developing architectures for others to implement than coding myself. But my expectation is that I’ll end my career writing instructions for AIs to implement; and that’s absolutely fine. The job didn’t change, just some of the intermediate representations I had to write to do it. The profession will probably go back to look more like the one I entered - fewer people doing it, but with more formal education in computer science, and much less “coding”.

Which is not to say I don’t think there’s anything to worry about for the profession, there absolutely is. How the hell we identify the future senior engineers with the actual skill and aptitude required, when there are no junior roles to provide the necessary apprenticeship - and when the education system is struggling to adapt to AI use in class - is a massive and fundamental problem. That’s what keeps me awake at night, not people who think writing CRUD APIs in C# is a divine gift.

Civilised countries use events like this as a vehicle (no pun intended) to build infrastructure - like public transport - for the event that will then be a public good after.

I try to always be nice to retail staff, because I remember well the sheer misery of having to stand sandwiched in a too-small window display cabinet, scraper in one hand and bottle of weak vinegar in the other, scraping the bloody advertising stickers off the glass (that were stuck on with a glue stronger than cement) with a roasting hot halogen floodlamp about 1" from your head, just because a new range has come in… Particularly soul-destroying if it’s that time of year when the same 5 royalty-free Christmas songs are on permanent loop in the background.

And yeah, you make a very good point. Sheer size/weight and cost of shipping would have been a huge chunk of the price of those old TVs! Not to mention the cost of healthcare for all the staff who put their back out dragging the damned things to and from The Cage… ;)

You do realise that you’re increasingly starting to sound like That Guy who rants “he uses a compiler to wrote his code! This is insane, it’ll never compare to hand written assembly!”, right?

Any remotely competent software engineer is using LLMs at least to find out what they’re capable of. And yes, they are capable of many useful things. The reality of utility lies at a point between the extremes of “not at all” and “100% vibe coded”.

You are welcome to do your hobby programming entirely with pen, paper and assembler - or just without any AI tools. It’s a hobby, you do you. But seriously, leave the professionals alone.

TVs were always cheap compared to cost to make the things - it’s not just the “oh, they have advertising now” thing.

Source: I worked in electronics retail in the late 80s/early 90s, and in one of the world’s largest consumer electronics firms when my career proper started.

The TVs in the window of the local electronics chain store (or in Walmart) were sold at practically zero margin, or more often than not at a loss. The retail chains would basically hold a gun to the CE companies heads and tell them if you’re not willing to sell at a loss, nothing you make is going in the window display, or worst case we’re not selling you at all.

The retail chains didn’t care because all their profit was in selling accessories and unnecessary extended warranties. The CE companies hoped that they could make it up by selling you the more expensive model they actually made a profit on once you were in the door, or by selling you a VCR or whatever as well.

This is why the TV companies were always looking for a “next big thing” (flat-screen, ultraflat, widescreen, HD, 3D, 4k, 8k…) to differentiate the “next model up”, which is to say the model the store would actually allow them to make a profit on.

This particular race-to-the-bottom mutually assured destruction business model is also the reason there is practically no consumer electronics manufacturing left in the West, of course. And why manufacturers grasp at stuff like advertising.

Republicans.