Thanks for this, just bought one. Been tempted to cave for the Apple XDR for a long time but just couldn't justify it and my 32" 4K just isn't quite cutting it. I see a few complaints here, so my fingers are crossed! I absolutely loved the LG Ultrafine 5K though but 27" was starting to feel limited as my eyes get older.
I got to thinking how difficult a micro business like this would be to run in the UK. You'd have council hygiene inspectors, insurance, alcohol duties, zoning limitations, music licensing, and the business rates folks all over your back for starters.
From being in California often and reading social media, I get the feeling California and UK share a lot of similarities in planning bureaucracy. Residential areas are sacrosanct and the idea of anyone running even a small public facing service business from the home is onerous (though, curiously, it's very common for dental or GP surgeries to be in converted residential property here).
Not to spoil the article (but there's a lot in there) but I was particularly intrigued by the ongoing tumbling of the price of IPs. After peaking in 2022, "these days the low price of $9 per address is back to the same price that was seen in 2014."
I was also surprised to find that out the other day when someone on Reddit was complaining they couldn’t get a good price on a /17 they were hoarding to sell for a profit. Good riddance.
This is true to some extent in the UK as well. We have a curious company car tax regime where CO2 emissions are used to define the tax rates so hybrids are somewhat lower, although it's still onerous compared to just buying a car personally.
However, pure EVs are taxed at very low rates in comparison, so if you own a company or have the ability to do a "salary sacrifice" for a car with your employer, it becomes very tax advantageous to get an EV. Your company can also pay for your insurance, EV charge installation, public charging costs (even for private mileage) and so forth, so it's very common to see small business owners in EVs compared to private buyers. Porsches also tend to have particularly low monthly payments compared to their value since I guess they hold their value well and can be traded back in at the end of the financing period. I don't have one, though, as a Porsche is just crying out to be keyed or mocked where I live compared to a more modest car.
I'm not in the COBOL world at all, but when I saw IBM putting out models for a while, I had to wonder if it was a byproduct of internal efforts to see if LLMs could help with the supposedly dwindling number of legacy mainframe developers. I don't know COBOL enough to be able to see if their Granite models are particularly strong in this area, though.
In the UK, this is less of a problem, though it depends a lot on the contract between the company and the developer. Assuming nothing exotic, that the statement on the site is true (and not a malicious falsehood) and that if the hosting belongs to the end customer they did not revoke the developer's access (i.e. no unauthorised access occurred), then the developer is in a reasonable position legally. IANAL, of course.
No unauthorized access but they would argue unauthorized vandalism by the developer, which blocks the entire site.
Airing dirty laundry is in some jurisdictions a legal offence. Which is exactly why there needs to be agreement spelled out in contracts upfront, that this could happen, and the client would just sign it.
And I am a fan of smart contracts and cryptocurrencies, see my suggestion below:
Airing dirty laundry is in some jurisdictions a legal offence.
In the UK, the place where the site in the original link is, it's okay to state facts about a business transaction in public if it's not a malicious falsehood, a violation of contract, or a violation of privacy laws (e.g. sharing emails or recorded calls). But yes, I agree, the issues leading up to this should all be tackled by the contract up front.
You wouldn't own the land. It's quite common with small business web design for the developer to also control the hosting. The actual point in the web site case is that you are revoking the copyright license to the content until you receive payment, a well tested and accepted concept in UK law.
That said, there have certainly been situations where builders have gone back to properties and taken back their property (like tiles from walls, joinery, etc.) but I have no idea how that pans out legally as it's outside my wheelhouse.
Cute trick! I pointlessly wondered if I could make it work with Ruby and you kinda can, if you can tolerate a single error message before the script runs (sadly # comments don't work as shells consider them comments too):
=begin
ruby $0; exit
=end
puts "Hello from Ruby"
Not immediately useful, but no doubt this trick will pop up at some random moment in the future and actually be useful. Very basic C99 too, though I'm not sure I'd want to script with it(!):
Your point also touches on the idea that new things are being created that might well never have. Like your virtual pet. You might have been commissioned to illustrate such a thing but most likely not, and it wouldn’t have been “yours.” It reminds me of when desktop publishing, MIDI sequencers, or PowerPoint took off and people produced all sorts of things that were largely not of high artisanal quality but it was new stuff, people got personal value from it (as it was harder to spread stuff around pre-Internet) and the tools eventually matured into what all the pros now use anyway.
That said, I concede the critics have many valid points and concerns and it’s going to be interesting to see how we navigate this flood of “stuff” at a scale never seen before. (I suspect it’ll end up like YouTube and video. Ultra long tail. Most stuff never seeing more than a few eyeballs and a smaller group getting the lion’s share of attention, as with most things. Did YouTube change TV and video production more generally? Yes! But it also didn’t destroy it..)
Your tireless experimenting (and especially documenting) is valuable and I love to see all of it. The avant garde nature of your recent work will draw the occasional flurry of disdain from more jaded types, but I doubt many HN regulars would think you had anything but good intentions! Guess I am basically just saying.. keep it up.
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