MartinMcGirk

I’ll take the other side of that argument. Without human space flight inspiring the public by pushing the boundaries of what humans can achieve, you would never get the public on board to get the political buy-in to send unmanned craft to anywhere.

If you didn’t have human Spaceflight you’d get the budget for gps, military, and maybe weather satellites and not a whole lot else.

What I have found is that using LLM’s to do the same stuff I already knew how to do is not super enjoyable. I know web application development, and having some agent build it for me is just a productivity gain with no job satisfaction. So I’ve been where you are recently.

But on the flip-side, using the AI to help me learn the bits of programming that I’ve spent my whole career ignoring, like setting up DevOps pipelines or containerisation, has been very enjoyable indeed. Pre-AI the amount of hassle I’d have to go through to get the syntax right and the infrastructure set up was just prohibitively annoying. But now that so much of the boilerplate is just done for me, and now that I’ve got a chat window I can use to ask all my stupid questions, it’s all clicking into place. And it’s like discovering a new programming paradigm all over again.

Can 100% recommend stepping outside your comfort zone and using AI to help where you didn’t want to go before.

I'm seeing a lot of negativity here so I'll take the positive view.

I regularly use ChatGPT for product advice. The other day I was replacing a wireless router, and I needed a WiFi 6 vs 6n vs 7 vs mesh vs not-mesh breakdown. It was great to have the AI explain all that, and it would recommend products, but there were no pictures, and no links, and definitely no price comparisons.

So I had to copy and paste product names from my GPT chat app into google, and then click around a bit, and repeat across 3 or 4 products. And then remember all that. I have no objections with ChatGPT showing me products I've asked about, and doing a price compare, and linking me. And I don't even have a problem with them wrapping those links in affiliate links if they want to.

As long as the suggestions they give aren't based on who pays them the most money then I think it's a value add.

Actually it seems like region-specific copyright deals are still very much in play. If I visit that playlist from Australia then 14 of the full movies are unavailable and hidden. But VPN'ing through the US shows me the whole set.

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though.

Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business problem. It probably lasts 5/10 years and then someone rewrites it in a new language, or more often the task isn’t relevant anymore so the code gets deleted.

I find myself thinking that maybe if I’d been in civil engineering or something then I’d be building stuff that lasts, but speaking to people who’ve worked a long time in construction has taught me that it’s the same there. Most of the buildings that go up, come down again in a few decades once regulations/fashions change or the new owner of the site wants something else.

Every so often something like a Cathedral gets built, and those get built to last. But most people don’t get to work on those. If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.

I'll take the other, more optimistic side of this.

The reason they're spending so much time on reinventing meetings is because they see that the killer use case for VR/AR headsets is to replace your laptop with a device that shows you a screen, or multiple screens, wherever you go, whenever you want it there.

If you start from the premise that eventually people won't huddle over their 16" laptop screens to make calls, but will instead be wearing a headset that shows them as many giant monitors as they like, then everything else flows from that. How do you handle calls in a world where every user is essentially wearing a visor? How do you collaborate? These aren't solved problems yet, but I'm a firm believer that the headset will replace the laptop, and if that happens I'll be glad somebody has put the effort in to make everything else around that as seamless as it can be.

Not that I'm sticking up for Russia here, but I think that assumes that there is a universal canonical "right" and a canonical "wrong", which I am not convinced about.

There's an arrow button at the bottom right of the page, that if you click it reveals a navbar with some links to a careers page and so on.

You can also click and drag to rotate the cube. But yeah, it doesn't do anything particular spectacular.

Not to flog a dead horse here, but your argument is that without the extension people will try it a couple of times and then forget about you.com, and go back to default.

But your target demographic is here telling you that with the extension requirement, they will try it zero times, because they don't want to change their default to a service they haven't tried yet.

A better idea would be to unblock search, show results to everyone regardless of browser defaults, and push hard for the extension install on the search results page once people can see the value prop you're offering.

Yeah my comment is kind of tangential to the post and aimed more at the general idea of location-dependent salaries.

I don’t argue with the concept of saying “we want you back in the office, if you don’t want to come to the office then take a pay cut” like is going on here.

I can see why you’d pay a remote staff member differently from an on-prem staff member. As others have said if you’re hiring remote then your talent pool is effectively the whole world, so price competition is fiercer.

But if everyone is remote or everyone is on-prem, then location-dependent pricing is complete nonsense. The employees are all still providing the same value to the company. Claiming that you can’t pay someone as much because they live in some rural town somewhere is just the company finding an excuse to keep a larger share of the value created by that employee.

I can think of two possible routes that would fulfil this criteria in different ways.

The first is to get an IT job at a government organisation that isn't heavily IT focussed, but needs someone on staff "just in case". I once interviewed for a job at a National Library for a 35,000 GBP/year role (with 20% pension). They had a system where someone could book a room to read old manuscripts, and there was a C# program that let people swipe in and out with a smart card. For some reason they needed a dev on staff full time just in case anything went wrong. That was the whole scope of the job. Apparently most of the IT people there had other personal gigs they worked on most of the day, and it was super flexible. I didn't take it because I wanted a job that would push me and force me to learn things, but I reckon there would be a few jobs like that in government that would give you what you want.

The other way isn't exactly what you asked for, but might appeal to you anyway. Recently I've been working as a software contractor, mostly doing 3-to-6 month contracts, mostly for companies that need extra resource to hit some looming deadline. It's intensive work for the duration of the contract, but the money is a lot better than being a permanent employee, and I've been finding that over the course of each contract you can save up so much money that you could happily take a few months off in-between roles if you wanted to do what you like. I'm using the time off (just starting what I envisage to be a 4 month break minimum) to try to build side projects, but you could spend 4-5 months playing sport or whatever just as easily. You might even find the contract route gives you the time to do your hobbies, and professional fulfilment too, because each is timeboxed into several month long stints. Personally I love it.

Thanks for replying! Sounds like I should try it out. My maths could use a refresher and I could use an engaging way to learn it. Much appreciated.

Tangential to the topic of this post, but how have you found brilliant? I’ve been considering it but don’t know if it’s worth adding another subscription to my monthly spend when I could presumably get a lot of the same knowledge from YouTube (albeit in a less structured way). Any thoughts?

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In the UK, bank notes are different sizes depending on their value. So that goes a long way towards stopping that kind of thing.

If that socialist candidate that you mentioned was big on, say, defense spending, and what you cared about most was defense spending, and the other candidate held the opposite view on defense spending, then it's not unreasonable that you might vote for the socialist candidate despite all the other character or political flaws that candidate might have.

Someone big on defense spending might not believe in any part of socialism, but vote for the socialist anyway to get the result they want on the issue they care about. I imagine they'd get annoyed if people started assuming they were socialist based on WHO they voted for, rather than WHY they voted for that person.

This is great. I keep telling myself that I'll learn Spanish. Something rapid fire like this but for Spanish would be so damned useful.

That was quick work! And I guess that homepage scrolled all along, so now I feel like a right chump for not noticing there was more info below.

Anyway, another fun thing for you to look at if you're so inclined is that when I just tried to sign up there, I clicked allow on the linked in authentication screen, and now I'm seeing a 404 nginx page at https://brandme.io/martin-mcgirk

The profiles look amazingly swish though, and custom domains would be huge. Can't wait to get one and congrats on the launch!

Thanks, looks great. I guess I'll sign up and give it a go then

I really like the idea of an online resume, but I'm hesitant to sign up without knowing what the end product might look like.

Are there example resumes I can look at to see what I'd be getting? If so, it might be a good idea to link to them on your site so that I can see if it floats my boat.

It was my understanding that his plan does not involve banning encryption, but rather it involves the creation of a legal framework which would make it OK for government organisations to break into encrypted communications and communication channels.

I'm not saying that his plan is a good one, but it's not the same thing as banning encryption all together like the this post rather rashly suggests. The source material that this post links to [1], but sadly misrepresents, is a much better read.

[1] http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/what-david-cameron-just-pro...

I occasionally get uncomfortable with this. I had an eerie experience with SwiftKey on Android a few months ago where I was sending someone my bank account details over SMS (I know, I know) so they could wire me some money, and I typed

"My bank account number is"

And the next suggested word from my keyboard was my actual bank account number. Same thing happened with my sort code. I guess I sent my details to someone a few months before and it just remembered the info.

Other than that slight "oh crap" moment though, the fact it listens to and remembers everything I write comes in super handy. Turns out I use the same few phrases a lot more than I thought I did, and swiping away at my keyboard, and having it predict my next word quickly and accurately saves me SO much time.

As I understand it (by reading up on the subject over the last few months - I'm no games professional), the DK2 uses one 1080p screen split across both eyes, but the sticking point is that it has to render each frame twice from slightly different positions in order to get the image right for each eye. Add to this that the DK2 needs to run at 75 frames a second for the experience to smooth, it means that your computer needs to be effectively running the game or demo at 150fps. It also has to have enough in the tank left over to power your computer monitor.

It's a great product though. If you can afford to upgrade your computer to accommodate it then I can't recommend the experience highly enough. Money well spent in my opinion.

I'm a bit late in replying, but hopefully you'll still see this. My current reasoning goes something like this:

The Oculus is aimed at high-end PC gamers. I know this because I have a desktop running an i7 3.5GHz quad core processor with 16GB of RAM and a £200 NVIDIA GTX 760 graphics card, and my PC still struggles occasionally to keep frame-rates high enough for VR. And that's just the DK2; expectations are that the consumer version will have a higher resolution and require even more oomph to work. Your average person that plays computer games on a PC is unlikely to have the resources available to commit to that kind of hardware expenditure.

My flatmate for instance plays a lot of games on steam, but they're mostly older games. If he wanted to get an Oculus he'd have to pay £300 for the headset, then another £200 (at least) for a new graphics card, more for a new processor (apparently some of the demos can be quite CPU intensive) and then he'd need to make sure his PSU could cope with all that extra hardware. That's a lot of money up front to make VR work. I should know because I just went through it.

Sony on the other hand has over 10 million PS4's in the wild, all running the same specs, and all with no upgrade path. If Sony can make a VR headset that runs against the PS4 specifications, even at lower graphics levels, then for PS4 owners the road to VR costs whatever Project Morpheus costs, and no more. Lets put it on equal pegging with the Oculus at around £300. That's a much easier sell.

Further to that, people own computers for a whole bunch of reasons. People work on their computers, they code, and they edit videos on them. Being able to play games for them is only part of the value they paid money for. Some people do have PC's purely for games, but I'd be surprised if most people used their PC's primarily for gaming. PS4 owners on the other hand have already shelled out money for a dedicated gaming device. People in that situation (so my theory goes) should be more easily sold on a VR gaming accessory.

The way I see things panning out is this. The Oculus will likely continue to provide the state-of-the-art in VR experience for the real VR fanatics or the hard core PC gamer crowd. They will also probably scoop up a whole bunch of professional users too, in the form of architects or engineers or the like. But the costs of all the peripheral PC equipment you need to make the Oculus a decent experience will see off the "mainstream". In my view, it'll take someone like Sony (or an xbox equivalent) to offer a lesser, but good-enough, product to a large audience of people who are already bought into "gaming" to really make VR a viable and mainstream gaming platform.

I think Sony stand a pretty good chance of "winning" for those reasons.

You know what this is going to be great for? Travelling.

I'm facing a flight from Scotland to Australia in December where I'm going to be sat in economy class on a no-frills Air-China flight for god-only-knows how long, and my options to distract myself are currently either read a book on my kindle, or play or watch something on the iPad. I would kill for one of these.

The problems with my existing options are that I can be distracted by seeing people moving around next to me, or I can check my watch absent mindedly, or one of many things might happen that could bring me back into the reality of being sandwiched into a sweaty tin can. Time can pass very slowly when you're travelling.

VR on the other hand completely transports your mind to a place where time isn't really relevant anymore. You need to block out all of your surroundings to really make it work, which means no seeing other passengers get up for toilet breaks, no listening to the engine buzzing along as you read. If I could put this headset on with a decent pair of headphones, and all of a sudden be flying around space in some mobile equivalent of Elite:Dangerous or watching a movie in properly immersive 3D then time would just speed by and my flight wouldn't be so bloody awful.

I've got an Oculus DK2, but I sadly can't lug my beast of a desktop PC on to a flight with me to power it. In terms of being the VR headset of choice for gamers, I'm pretty convinced that Sony will eventually win that battle with their PS4 Project Morpheus headset. This won't compete with either of those two excellent experiences, but I think that as a traveling accessory at least, a wireless headset that uses your phone as a screen could be a god-send.

>It's a pretty long, annoying process to become a member, but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die.

The thing that always disappoints me whenever I read about cryogenic freezing is that people seem to have to already be dead before anyone is allowed to freeze them.

From the article:

>Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility... As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals... Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit.

I always thought that the great selling point of cryo was that if you have some incurable-by-today's-science condition and you are shortly about to die, then you could be frozen instead, and then unfrozen and promptly cured many years later once someone has figured out a reliable treatment.

Isn't waiting until you are already clinically dead before having yourself frozen missing the point?

Well, not to undermine the gist of your point (which I agree with) but instead of voting for a party per se, you actually vote for a local Member of Parliament, who can be a member of a party or not, and is free to switch party whenever they like as they sees fit.

I think you might be right on this. If I signed up to a service like this and there was no one in my area, but the app suggested that I might like to chat to these 50 odd people online in London or San Francisco, I might well stick around.

I don't know how you would work it for an app that is supposed to be all about local though. If I sign up, and get connected to, say, some guy called Brian in New York and the conversation is great, but then the app grows really quickly and all of a sudden the app decides Brian isn't close enough for me to talk to anymore, it might leave a sour taste.

There are definitely exciting UX possibilities with this though. I need to think on this a bit further.

I feel like there is definitely something in this basic idea. Although I'm not sure that a rigid 1 mile boundary really makes a whole lot of sense. I'll explain:

I feel like the experience you get with an app like, say, tinder, which lets a user chat to attractive people locally, is really quite an incredible proposition. In tinder's case the hook is that you are chatting to, and then hopefully meeting with, a slice of the local population that you find attractive and that also find you attractive. You both find each other attractive - so you have that in common.

What I find myself hankering after more and more though is a service that lets you discover a slice of the local population with which you have other things in common. Not a dating app, but rather an app where I could chat about a topic I'm interested in (technology, hockey, model trains, tiddlywinks, you name it) with people who are also interested in that topic and then hopefully connect and meet up with those people who all happen to live fairly locally.

Hacker News for instance is great for tech chat, but as someone who lives a long long way from SV I find that it's much tougher to actually MEET people who share my interest in tech. There are tech events going on around where I live, but it's still an intimidating prospect showing up to some niche interest event when you haven't met or chatted to anyone there before. Technology is big interest of mine, so in the end I did seek out events and other ways to connect to like-minded people. But I have a much less active interest in, say, sailing. It wouldn't normally occur to me to go seek out a sailing club or a sailing meetup of some kind locally, but I might still like to chat about it. And chatting about it with similarly interested people nearby might lead me eventually to go along to such an event and meet new friends and try new experiences.

I feel like Kiwichat goes some way towards implementing that vision, but I just signed in, and my one mile radius shows no chats nearby. I live in Edinburgh, in Scotland, which isn't always the first city to bustle with new technology, but it's maybe 5 or 10 miles in diameter, and I have no way of knowing if someone else in Edinburgh is using this site, but from a location only a couple of miles away. Maybe I'm missing out on some new connection, or experience, all because I couldn't put my radius up to a level that makes sense for me personally.

I feel like this is close to the app I really want. Closer than anything I've seen so far, but still sadly quite a way off. It says on your landing page that it's for "events, meetups, or just chatting with people nearby e.g. students in your campus". If you're at an event or meetup then you are already most of the way there and you are probably talking in person. If you're on a small campus then this might serve the need I'm looking for. But if your campus is big and spread out (like mine was at university), or you live in a small city or town and want to chat to people that you could easily meet, then it's just not serving that need... Yet.

In terms of execution though it looks great, the sign in experience is pretty much flawless. Congrats on your launch.