I’ve noticed pretty much zero disruption on Firefox with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock despite Google’s best efforts. Every time I thought I’d eventually be paying Google the Danegeld to avoid the firehose of spam I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

It depends on the artistic and technological intent I think. Valve (tube) amplifiers are inferior to any modern amplifier in every way you could actually measure with an oscilloscope yet people still build them and valves are still produced they same way they were in the 1950s because the imperfections they produce in the sound can sound pleasant, which is down to psychoacoustic factors which have subjective as well as objective components. A photo that looks exactly like what we’d see naturally is one potential goal but it’s not the only one in my opinion.

I’m currently working in medtech, I don’t want to dox myself because the company is quite niche but it involves using machine learning to diagnose a particular disease much earlier when it’s more treatable. I’m managed by an experienced senior engineer who’s probably forgotten more about about the profession than I know and the workload is reasonable and well compensated. Yeah it’s a startup so you temper your expectations in terms of long-term job security but there’s definitely good companies out there, don’t get me wrong there’s a lot about the industry and the broader socioeconomic context it exists in that’s awful but there’s a lot of good opportunities too. I could bitch about the ecosystem for hours but at the end of the day I’m a bit of a drama queen, I’m well paid for interesting work and you can’t say fairer than that.

There’s certainly much more than adtech, you could actually exclude business to consumer industries entirely if you wanted and make an excellent living in the business to business sector where there’s lots of interesting problems to solve. If you’re thinking of training as a software engineer or similar and entering the industry I’d still very much recommend it if it’s something you enjoy and are good at. Give frontend a wide berth if you’re worried about framework churn too, the vast majority of my work is backend where the churn isn’t as bad and there’s always plenty of work for you if you’re decent at SQL and a couple of common languages used for that purpose.

We’re not all patent-shagging tech bros, if you want proof of this you can look at how most of the industry runs on freely shared code that’s written in enormous volumes for no other reason making the lives of programmers easier and therefore improving their productivity. If this almost anarchistic process stopped even for a month the whole thing would fall over and never get up again!

IP maximalists really screwed the pooch by inventing the term ‘piracy’ for copyright infringement, they made the act sound ten times cooler.

I’ll back you on that, Mac OS X Tiger was the prettiest OS Apple ever made in my opinion although Leopard was fantastic as well. The iPod in general and early iOS was gorgeous as well.

There’s enough astroturf on Reddit for a continent’s worth of obnoxious suburban fake lawns.

There’s nothing wrong with speculation as long as everyone knows that’s what going on.

Take the work of Julian Jaynes for example; it’s fringe, it’s speculative, but he’s asking questions that nobody else asked before and that in itself is worthwhile because it can pave the way for better questions which are falsifiable.

Yeah I’ve no love for Musk but Twitter is full of pretty unpleasant people in general and it made political journalism worse by encouraging low-effort hot takes over slower more thoughtful content. I won’t miss it when it’s gone.

My problem isn’t really with its politics (I’m quite left-wing myself these days) but its personalities, you can be politically progressive without having the mentality of a schoolyard bully and that’s what Twitter was fundamentally about, bullying the main character of the day.

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I lived in rural Wales for a while so I know this feeling. Growing up in England I thought I knew about rain before but on the Cambrian Coast it rains sideways.

Depends on the monitor, my one has a 3.5mm jack to get analogue audio out of the HDMI input which I use to get audio from my Xbox to the rest of my setup.

Good for them, doesn’t change the fact I find driving at 20 mph very frustrating compared to 30 mph for that reason.

I think this policy will fail to be honest; while I’m not in Wales any more Oxford where I live now is a supposed ‘cycling city’ with most roads at 20 mph and honestly I hate being on the road there either in a car or on a bike; I get the bus in even though it’s often flaky. Driving you’re sat between second and third gear the whole time so you’re either revving too hard and wasting petrol or the car naturally speeds up so you’re spending a lot of attention on not getting fined rather than keeping it on the road, and when you’re cycling the cars that do keep to 20 mph linger beside you for what feels subjectively a lot longer when they overtake which isn’t fun either and the tiny bike lines make you feel vulnerable to traffic. I had a lot of near misses when I did it regularly and Oxford is a very small city, the idea of cycling somewhere like Cardiff would be terrifying to me.

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Can confirm, I write Scala at my current workplace and spend my days over the moon about the fact I’m not writing Java.

That’s fundamentally why you can’t replace a software engineer with ChatGPT, only a software engineer has the skillset to verify the code isn’t shit even if it superficially works.

Yeah the guitar amp and vintage HiFi markets keep a few types (mostly power triodes and pentodes but also preamp valves and even a couple of rectifiers) in production, largely in the former Eastern Bloc. There’s a few people on YouTube making their own too.

I’m so far from an expert it’s not even funny but I’m a hobbyist for old valve (tube on the other side of the Atlantic) electronics. You need an industrial base to make semiconductors but if you can do flamework with glass and build a good enough pump that opens the door to amplifiers, radio, telecommunications, and even crude computers which in turn opens the door to a lot of creature comforts and social improvement that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

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Vintage audio is the best, I’m planning on building a Mullard 5-10 hifi valve amp from the 1950s in the relatively near future as my second valve project (a micro-power valve AM radio transmitter is my current work in progress). The parts are spendy especially the transformers but valve/tube stuff is just so cool and the fact you can just build a 70 year old design using datasheets of the same vintage and have it work just as well now is so refreshing to my programmer brain that’s used to stuff going out of date when you blink. Also I’m a magpie for glass and glowing things.

The downside is of course that the voltages involved tend to be rather unpleasant, the 5-10 design calls for 250 volts off the top of my head and some amps use 500+. Also they’re unspeakably inefficient by modern standards, it’s essentially a statement of ‘I’m putting rule of cool over sensible cost-sensitive engineering and you’re going to love it’ which I’m very here for.